Knowledge, Spirit, Law is a de facto phenomenology of scholarship in the age of neoliberal capitalism. The eleven essays (plus Appendices) in Book 1: Radical Scholarship cover topics and circle themes related to the problems and crises specific to neoliberal academia, while proposing creative paths around the various obstructions. The obstructions include metrics-obsessed academia, circular and incestuous peer review, digitalization of research as stalking horse for text- and data-mining, and violation by global corporate fiat of Intellectual Property and the Moral Rights of Authors. These issues, while addressed obliquely in the main text, definitively inform the various proscriptive aspects of the essays and, via the Introduction and Appendices, underscore the necessity of developing new-old means to no obvious end in the production of knowledge — that is to say, a return to forms of non-instrumentalized intellectual inquiry. To be developed in two concurrent volumes, Knowledge, Spirit, Law will serve as a “moving and/or shifting anthology” of new forms of expression in humanistic studies. Book 2: The Anti-Capitalist Sublime will be published in Autumn 2017.

About the author

Gavin Keeney is an editor, writer, and critic. His most recent books include Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image (2012) and Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture (2014), both produced as part of PhD studies conducted in Australia and Europe from 2011 to 2014. He is the Creative Director of Agence ‘X’, an editorial and artists’ and architects’ re-representation bureau founded in New York, New York, in October 2007.

Photo by La caverne aux trésors

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Denis Roio: This thesis describes a practice based research journey across various projects dealing with the design of algorithms, to highlight the governance implications in design choices made on them. The research provides answers and documents methodologies to address the urgent need for more awareness of decisions made by algorithms about the social and economical context in which we live. Algorithms constitute a foundational basis across different fields of studies: policy making, governance, art and technology. The ability to understand what is inscribed in such algorithms, what are the consequences of their execution and what is the agency left for the living world is crucial. Yet there is a lack of interdisciplinary and practice based literature, while specialised treatises are too narrow to relate to the broader context in which algorithms are enacted.

This thesis advances the awareness of algorithms and related aspects of sovereignty through a series of projects documented as participatory action research. One of the projects described, Devuan, leads to the realisation of a new, worldwide renown operating system. Another project, “sup”, consists of a minimalist approach to mission critical software and literate programming to enhance security and reliability of applications. Another project, D-CENT, consisted in a 3 year long path of cutting edge research funded by the EU commission on the emerging dynamics of participatory democracy connected to the technologies adopted by citizen organizations.

My original contribution to knowledge lies within the function that the research underpinning these projects has on the ability to gain a better understanding of sociopolitical aspects connected to the design and management of algorithms. It suggests that we can improve the design and regulation of future public, private and common spaces which are increasingly governed by algorithms by understanding not only economical and legal implications, but also the connections between design choices and the sociopolitical context for their development and execution.

Full text available for download here

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Fortunately, there exist many experiments with non-capitalist modes of assessing and exchanging value, sharing goods and services, and making decisions that can help us transition to a more sustainable political economy based on principles of degrowth. One of the best ways to generate non-capitalist subjects, objects, and spaces comes from systems designed to manage common pool resources like the atmosphere, ocean, and forests. Commons-based systems depend upon self-governance and reciprocity. People rely on and take responsibility for each other, finding mutually beneficial ways to fulfill their needs. This also allows communities to define the guidelines and incentives for guiding their own economic behavior, affording people more autonomy and greater opportunity for protecting and cultivating shared values. Commons-based systems cut across the private/public, market/state dichotomy and present alternative economic arrangements defined by communities.

According to David Bollier, “As the grand, centralized market/state systems of the 20th century begin to implode through their own dysfunctionality, the commons will more swiftly step into the breach by offering more local, convivial and trusted systems of survival.”³ Already, there is evidence of this happening. The commons is spreading rapidly among communities hit hardest by recent financial crises and the failures of austerity policies. In response to the failures of the state and market, many crises-stricken areas, especially in Europe and South America, have developed solidarity economies to self-manage resources, thus insulating themselves from systemic shocks in the future. It seems likely that a community’s capacity to share will be crucial to its survival on a wetter, hotter, and meaner planet.

From the perspective of researchers, there are several different ways to define the commons. In most cases, the commons are understood to be material objects. For example, the atmosphere and ocean are global commons, because they are resources we must all learn to regulate and share collectively. This notion of the commons as material resource goes hand-in-hand with another notion that the commons can be both material and immaterial, a product of either nature or culture. Using this second definition enhances our appreciation for what is often undervalued by traditional economic measures such as care work, shared knowledge production, and cultural preservation. Together, both these perspectives are helpful in devising political and economic strategies for managing the commons, which remains the dominant interest of most commons researchers and policymakers.

Nevertheless, whether material or immaterial, the commons are viewed as a given concept or thing, ignoring that more fundamentally they are generated by social practices. In other words, there are no commons without commoners to enact them. From an enactive perspective, commons are not objects, but actions generated by many different actors in relationship. Whereas the prior notions assume that individuals need to be regulated and punished to prevent overconsumption (an assumption known as the tragedy of the commons), an enactive perspective on commons conceives the individual in relation to everyone (and everything) involved in co-managing the more-than-human commons. It therefore diverges from the prior two notions in assuming a relational epistemology rather than being premised on a liberal epistemology based on the individual. From a Buddhist perspective, one could say that the commons emerges co-dependently with a field of objects, forces, and passions entangling the human and nonhuman, living and non-living, organic and machinic.

The more-than-human commons thus does not dualistically separate the material and immaterial commons, the commons (as object) from the commoners (as subjects), nor does it separate humans from nonhumans. Instead, the commons are always understood as a more-than-human achievement, neither wholly produced by nature or culture. Commoning becomes, as Bayo Akomolafe points out, a material-discursive doing shaped by practices and values that engage humans with their environments.⁴ In Patterns of Commoning, David Bollier and Silke Helfrich argue that all commons exceed conceptual distinctions, because they are not things; rather, they are another way of being, thinking about, and shaping the world.⁵ Commoning is about sharing the responsibility for stewardship with the intent to construct a fair, free, and sustainable world—a goal that is all the more important given the unequal distribution of risks posed by intensifying climate change.

Read the entire essay/issue at The Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture & Politics.

Zack Walsh is a PhD candidate in the Process Studies graduate program at Claremont School of Theology. His research is transdisciplinary, exploring process-relational, contemplative, and engaged Buddhist approaches to political economy, sustainability, and China. His most recent writings provide critical and constructive reflection on mindfulness trends, while developing contemplative pedagogies and practices for addressing social and ecological issues. He is a research specialist at Toward Ecological Civilization, the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China, and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany. He has also received lay precepts from Fo Guang Shan, an engaged Buddhist organization based in Taiwan, and attended numerous meditation and monastic retreats in Thailand, China, and Taiwan. For further information and publications, please connect: https://cst.academia.edu/ZackWalsh, https://www.facebook.com/walsh.zack, and https://www.snclab.ca/category/blog/contemplative-ecologies/.

Illustration by Alicia Brown

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Étienne Le Roy: Writing about commons as a member of a scientific community, which itself has developed only recently, has raised a number of problems for me.

First, there is the time lag with which the complex problem of the commons gained our attention in the first place. Why didn’t that happen fifty years ago? Why did it take so long to overcome the obstacles that made us unable to recognize social phenomena as commons phenomena and to think about them as such? Even though I had answers to many questions and was already writing within the paradigm of sharing, I was still unable to ask the questions using commons terminology.

The second problem lies in the fact that opening up the topic of the commons triggers a kind of domino effect. As soon as the first domino falls over – by invoking the commons – many of the concepts on which the idea of modern Western civilization rests lose their apparent balance, and the whole edifice, previously believed to be well-founded, collapses onto itself: the state, the law, the market, the nation, work, contracts, debts, giving, the juristic person, private property, as well as institutions such as kinship, marital law, and the law of succession, are suddenly called into question. We often consider these concepts to be universally valid, but intercultural comparison reveals that they are only a custom, a folkway that deeply influenced our modern Western legal tradition (which itself proves to be a folk law of its own).

Finally, the third problem has to do with the highly political, even polemic character of the contemporary commons debate, as currently expressed in France by Pierre Laval and Christian Dardot in their book Commun. Even the subtitle does not mince words: “Essay on the revolution in the 21st century.” Laval and Dardot bring important questions back into the academic debate, questions that Karl Marx raised as early as the mid-nineteenth century when reflecting upon the meaning and the role of capital.

The attention currently granted the commons suggests approaching these problems one by one, first in order to make the “question of the commons” comprehensible, and then to examine how they relate to contemporary law. One thing should be clear from the outset, however: theoretically, commons could be an alternative to the market and the state, but practically, we are a long way from achieving that. And if we follow Professor Elinor Ostrom, then the unresolved social question of the twenty-first century.¹ should in any case focus on how commons and private property might coexist and complement each other.

I graduated from university with degrees in anthropology and public law in 1964. While I was conducting research for my thesis (corresponding to a master’s degree today), I discovered Michel Alliot, a young professor coming from Africa, as well as the scientific discipline of legal anthropology and the land question in Africa, particularly in Senegal. These three discoveries were to change my life.

I selected Michel Alliot as my academic advisor and wrote my doctoral dissertation, one of the first in legal anthropology in France (Le Roy 1970), about the Senegalese land reform and Law 64-46, which was one of the first dissertations on legal anthropology in France. My ambition was to comment not only on the origins and roots of this reform, but also to explain what it actually sought to cover and regulate: namely consuetudinary law, or customary, unofficial types of law.²  I dug into the history of possession of land in a sub-Saharan African society, all the way back to the sixteenth century, and discovered the field of the commons, but could not find a concept, a term for it.

I later discovered that this was because of the ethnocentric ideology of colonialism³ and the foundations on which the thinking of the modern age and the notion of development of that time rested.⁴ So-called consuetudinary law was an Unidentified Scientific Object (USO). Only a few scholars had attempted to actually comprehend its more profound features. The scientific community usually dealt with legal phenomena in Africa as if they were the opposite of Western legal concepts developed over the past three centuries. Primitivism⁵ and scientific arrogance are never far apart.

This USO status of consuetudinary law also has to do with the fact that its rules are not formulated according to generally recognized standards or the impersonal criteria of modern laws; instead they manifest themselves as enduring patterns of behavior and the willingness of people to engage in certain forms of action that is stable over time. Now, these can be grasped and researched only by employing specific models, so I decided to use a matrix to represent consuetudes as legal acts. Legal acts not in the sense of written law, but in the sense of patterns that are expressed in behavioral rules that can be found in the various communities.

That is how I succeeded in responding to a phenomenon that I had just discovered and that challenged received bodies of research: legal pluralism. It was surprising that even by organizing my research according to the principles of a matrix analysis, I had already discovered the basic elements of the description of the commons – without being aware of it: a community in which everyone has status, an activity recognized and appreciated by the others, and a resource that – symbolically – permits the intentions and dispositions of everyone involved to be interconnected. In sum, a sanctionable system that amounts to “law.”

In my early works and in those of the 1970s in which I developed the anthropological models of the relationship of human beings to land (Le Roy 2011), I focused on the problem of communities. I could discern fundamental community-based conceptions that influence actions, and my discussions also included the civil-law concept of common goods. But however surprising from today’s perspective, the term “commons” never appeared in my work, even though the mbock thinking of the West African Wolof had already left its mark on my analyses.

Mbock – in the Wolof language – means kinship, and at its core, it also means sharing. At times, it refers to common ancestors, at others, to a particular field (with its specific area and boundaries), a herd, forest areas, and many other things. The discovery that sharing is preferred to exchange suddenly challenges all those insights that anthropology felt to be certain: namely, limited exchange within kinship relations, according to the theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss,⁶ the concept of the gift according to Marcel Mauss,⁷ that of property according to Maurice Godelier⁸, and others. Sharing is the predominant principle of organization in the commons. But I came to understand that only between 1980 and 1990 while I elaborated a new model for managing land and areas for fruit cultivation (Le Roy 1996). In that model, I attempted to explain how Africans (and other humans, too) combine various legal forms of property and resource uses in their complex practices – transcending cultural boundaries that we imagine as defining. Modern science considers the incompatibility or even incoherence of many such combinations practically a truism.

A Reform of Unforeseen Consequence

I told the stories of all these intellectual adventures in my synthesis on land policy on Senegal, from a theoretical perspective (Le Roy 2011). In it, I combined the legal relationships of individualistic modernity (public and private) with those of communitarianism (external, internal and coalitions). In other words, I correlated the categories publicand private, or a combination of the two, with external and internal, respectively. The concept of the common proved useful in ordering these relationships according to the following logic:

•  public = belonging to all
•  external = belonging to “n” groups
•  alliance = belonging to two or more groups
•  internal = belonging to one group
•  private = belonging to a juridical or physical individual, or legal entity

Doubtless, all these possibilities of collective organization did not already lead to what contemporary commons theory (Bollier 2014; Dardot & Laval 2014) considers to be “commons,” but since 1996, avant la lettre, at least this concept of the common has been at the center of my analyses of land policy. With a thirty-year time lag!

One of the reasons for this false start lies in the anthropological paradigm itself. It concerns itself with “the law” – in my case, regarding land use in Senegal. Accordingly, the conceptual and methodological tools that are required for understanding what has not and literally cannot be thought in the realm of consuetudinary law, can only be expressed in the intellectual categories of lawyers – in other words, norms and legal provisions. Whereas from the anthropologists’ perspective, “law [is] not so much what the texts say, but rather what the actors do with it” (Le Roy 1999). The texts are important, but how they are interpreted and applied is even more important. Or as a French saying goes, “It’s a long way from the cup to the mouth.” In the endogenous, oral African contexts, there are no texts that could be interpreted and no explicit norms which could be the subject of legal commentary. One can only observe the practices! By granting the requisite attention to the positions and roles of actors, their status, their actions and their interrelationships, anthropologists are able to escape the abstractions that fundamentally structure Western legal systems, but which are not to be found in the Wolof and other societies that anthropologists study.

The concept of the commons is an abstraction circulated first and foremost by the field of economics. And it is precisely in economics that Garrett Hardin’s all-too-famous “tragedy of the commons” parable has gained currency since its publication in 1968.⁹ For at least a generation this make-believe idea that shepherds are unable to use their pastures jointly has undermined and marginalized research on collective resource management. Incidentally, I admit that I did not take this laughable story seriously until the mid-1980s when I began to recognize the collateral damage of this pseudo-theory and its sloppy generalizations.¹⁰

The second reason for the false start of the commons in the intellectual debate concerns the theories on “development” applied to countries that were called “underdeveloped” at the time. By passing the Law Concerning the Territory of the Country,¹¹ Senegal finally emancipated itself from a development model that is fundamentally connected to the market and private property. This took place in the name of an African socialism that was at least as open to poet-president Léopold Senghor’s¹² Négritude – a poetic discovery of African roots – as it was to breaking with capitalism. Yet in this case, it was not about breaking with capitalism, but about placing limits on the outright dominance of private property norms – a legacy of the colonial era. Accordingly, Law 64-46 did not seek to abolish private property; it even permitted completion of all pending proceedings concerning private rights still awaiting resolution in land registry processes. Applications above and beyond this (for example, for recording further private real estate in the land registry) would thereafter be subject to the control of the administration. This provision was intended to prevent private property, which President Senghor called “egoistic” in a 1964 speech, from having direct effects on social relationships.

According to this reform, the only justification for transforming local, endogenous property rights into state property is to enable market transactions for the public good (Article 13), which then authorizes the state to transfer the rights to private individuals. This approach is based on the assumption that public institutions in Senegal, like any institutions of a liberal, democratic state, are neutral and fair-minded – a presumption that was unfortunately disproven by later facts. We shall see how this “nationalization” flirts with socialism. To this end, we shall first examine the wording of the law and then its practical application.

From the Wording of the Law…

Formally speaking, 96 percent of Senegal’s territory belongs to the nation-state; the remainder is publicly administered plots of land or private landholdings that have already been recorded in the land registry. This “territory belonging to the nation” has no legal personality and is not a legal entity, and so by default it belongs to the Senegalese state. Accordingly, what truly matters in a legal and political sense is the interpretation of the term “belong.” Article 2 interprets it in the sense of trust in a common-law context.

In other words, Law 64-46 changes the arrangements concerning possession of land in a way that is to prove forward-looking for Senegal, for colonial law usually treated these tracts of land as the private property of the state; they were considered unused, “ownerless” areas available to the administration for whatever it chose. Today, by contrast, they are entrusted to specific local administrators and divided into four areas subject to different regulations: 1) urban land; 2) development land (zones classées); 3) land in rural areas (zones de terroirs); and 4) pioneer areas.

A substantial part of this very brief law – just seventeen articles – is concerned with these zones de terroirs that are managed by rural collectivities (communautés rurales). This is where the most references to commons are to be found. The law states that “the land in rural areas (zones de terroirs) are used by members of the local municipalities who guarantee its management and conduct it under state control (…)” (Article 8) and that the decisionmaking power for specific uses (Article 9) or setting aside land (Article 15) lies with the relevant councils of the municipality rural community in question. That is one provision that would actually have authorized self-organization among people to create and formalize a culture of the commons – had party politics not interfered. And this is where real life comes into play.

…to Real Life

Building on my first fieldwork in 1969, and making use of my contacts with the Minister of Rural Development, Ben Mady Cissé, I wanted to get to the bottom of the land-policy questions raised by the experimental implementation of Law 64-46. Following the defense of my doctoral dissertation in 1970, I actually sent my research findings to President Senghor, who unfortunately entrusted them to his Minister of the Interior Jean Colin. Colin, a former colonial civil servant, had become Senegalese by marriage. He saw my findings as a threat to his own plans to place the rural communities under government supervision (in typical French-Jacobin manner) and manage them as regional grassroots collectives (collectivités territoriales de base). The transition from the principle of self-organization to integration in a central administrative network fundamentally changed the role of the rural municipalities’ communities despite the decentralization of government power in 1972.

Commons theory usually underlines the independence of commons from both the market and the state. While markets in Senegal were at a distance from commons, the state got quite involved in land use at the local level by reducing the autonomy of rural communities. The idea of the commons was not only nonexistent as a legal concept, but any disagreements about the commons were settled – at least officially.

Yet the Senegalese people on the ground continued to take up the original reform ideas. Despite a lack of sufficient administrative procedures and overly detailed interventions by the relevant divisions, people took on responsibility for managing their own resources and rallied behind an ethic to curb the spread of private property rights. Even the powerful religious Muslim brotherhoods cooperated, which cannot be said of domestic and foreign investors. They have called for repeal of Law 64-46 since 1980. But despite all the many controversies and conflicts, the law marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2014. Amazingly, despite political, economic, and procedural ambiguities and at times radical opposition in the highest echelons of the Senegalese state, in the end a logic of the commons prevailed in practice. Was this a unique case?

Functional Rather than Institutional Logic

In 2012, I decided to attend a conference for lawyers and legal historians at the University Paris VIII-Saint-Denis on the topic, “The Resurgence of the Commons: Between Illusions and Necessities,” whose debates were later documented in a publication (Parance and Saint Victor 2014). The conference painted a much more positive picture of the commons than was discernible at first from the invitation. I developed three arguments in my presentation:

1. Our modern society has lost the experience of commons and commoning.
2. The rediscovery of the commons suggests that the paradigm of sharing is more attractive than that of exchange.
3. The rise of commons necessarily raises the question about legal pluralism.

To provide evidence for this, I referred to two different experiences: land reforms in Africa and the island states of the Indian Ocean, as well as observations about French society in both urban and rural areas.

Land Reforms and the Limits of Private Property

Putting land reform into practice is always a delicate undertaking. In the African context, it also poses conundrums, because one often must create ownership of land in the first place where previously no such ownership existed – and at times the communities involved refuse to accept its existence at all. And for good reason: they feel safer if they are protected by kinship or other relationships where they live, and not by remote civil institutions directed by people unknown to them. The world has surely changed, but not for everyone, and not in a linear fashion.

The Senegalese land reform illustrated a combination of political concerns, lobbying by international donors, and uncertainty about the dynamics of rapidly changing societies. In the end, experts seeking to set policies face a dilemma. On the one hand, there is an officially proclaimed commitment to so-called modernization at the global level, which must in no case be abandoned; and on the other hand, the resilience¹³ of communities and societies in the face of countless changes must be supported or there may be outbreaks of unprecedented violence (Appadurai 2013). If it is impossible to reject “progress” in the modern capitalist sense, then at least changes must correspond to the needs of the entire population, and not only to those of the Westernized elite. And they must recognize the limits of reproducible and sustainable “development” driven by globalization.

Even if we researchers have not understood everything over the course of these roughly thirty years, at least we have all learned a lot, in particular through activities of the Association for the Advancement of Research and Studies on the Possession of Land in Africa (APREFA)¹⁴, which I chaired from 1986 until 1996. At the time, we established a technical committee – i.e., without political decisionmaking power – on possession of land and development, within the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We sought to bring together the researchers’ expertise with diplomats and development cooperation staff who need informed analysis. The committee pursued a notion of applied research and development cooperation practice, and at the same time sought to promote interdisciplinary basic research. Here, too, the central research question was about the extent and form in which private ownership of land was to be recognized.

Our work showed that private property¹⁵ and property (as its equivalent in common law) are necessary only in contexts in which the market, organized along capitalist principles, is ubiquitous. Various intermediate forms between a lack of titles of ownership on the one hand and “absolute” property on the other, can both accommodate the needs of local producers and reduce the risk of land-grabbing. The models for dominance and control of soil and natural resources described above are based on this assumption. So are the solutions used by various communities of practice who also implement a commons logic and ethic, but whose practices have rarely been described theoretically. This, too, is a lesson arising from our work: the illusions of development, according to which everyone was to somehow become a private property owner and entrepreneur. Such narrative ideals conceal the necessary displacement of populations, the consolidation of land rents into few hands, and the decline of smaller, more locally oriented producers.

Let us remember: good governance in twenty-first century land policy should include variable configurations of private and common property, always aligned to the needs of respective groups of people on the ground. The Senegalese experience began by desiring to control the expansion of private property rights. For this purpose, the state was accorded a role that it exceeded so tremendously that it in effect eclipsed the commons as a functional and legal entity in Senegalese villages. At the same time, we must recognize the importance of different types of property, just as various kinds of commons exist. This is precisely what my experience on the Comoros has taught me since 1986.

At the time, the FAO (the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) asked me to head a group of experts tasked with stabilizing land policy on the Comoros. A former French colony, the country experienced a revolutionary crisis between 1975, when it gained independence, and 1978. Among other things, this brought about the occupation of the former colonial properties, where vanilla and flowers for perfume were grown. It also resulted in all land registers being burned; entire archives were annihilated – and with them, the titles of ownership. In 1986, in an economically unstable situation and under pressure from international donors, the government was forced to clarify land policy in order to attract investors, and to do so without provoking new rounds of violence.

Since I was an expert on land rights, my job was to propose various scenarios. I outlined six options and described their potentials and limits. They ranged from “everything” (proactive and rapid expansion of private property to the entire population) to “nothing” (the government would settle for resolving the most sensitive conflicts, thus permitting local power relationships and local forms of negotiation to prevail). If, after almost thirty years, it looks like we are close to “nothing,” because no reform was ever formally put into practice, then we would be closing our eyes to the intellectual and technical revolution that permitted the functionaries of rural development to tackle the problem of land use according to the principle of inalienability that the government approved in 1987. The parliament of the Comoros was unable to fully implement the wording of the law because Hamed Abdallah, the president of the republic, was murdered in November 1989.

The future of major transnational corporations was in danger. And our challenge was now to stabilize smallholder agriculture, so that it could feed the country and guarantee the export of certain colonial goods. To do so, some innovations were necessary, for example, the enclosure¹⁶ of plant material on those lands that had previously been freely accessible and had been managed as village commons, but were used by individual families.¹⁷

In addition, technical consultants and rural technicians helped hold regular village administrative council meetings: reliable, but hardly formalized meetings of farmers and elders every Friday evening as they left the mosque. The meetings were intended to prevent problems and resolve local tensions before they developed into conflicts. The options I had presented in my legal texts were implemented in social practices because a culture of negotiation prevailed at all levels of political-administrative life, and because the notion of inalienability was favored over that of absolute property. The development consultants had two beneficial effects: they saved the government the political costs and uncertainties of land reform, and they guaranteed the citizenry a lifestyle that, although modest and often close to poverty, was more dignified than that of many of the country’s neighbors (such as Madagascar, which in 1991 had fallen back to its 1896 poverty level again).

Later on, I was to work in Madagascar, too, but only after two more assignments: the first one took me to Niger to contribute to drafting the country’s agricultural legislation (Code rural), the second to Mali, where I observed numerous legal inconsistencies concerning the possession of land. I had been tasked with helping to rescue the country’s cotton industry. All three countries – Niger, Mali and Madagascar – already had their own histories of land tenure law, so simply “copying and pasting” systems that seemed to work in other countries was unthinkable. That would have produced problems similar to those arising in the aftermath of colonialism: private ownership of land that could be used or sold for any purpose; undue state interference in property ownership; and no legal recognition of people’s traditional practices in managing land.

In Madagascar, I plunged into the so-called real economy and observed the wood energy sector. The communally managed eucalyptus plantings on the so-called tanety¹⁸ provided a livelihood for the local population. Then I expanded my research to the contractual relationships as I was interested in the substance and extent of leasehold clauses¹⁹ as well as sharecropping²⁰ and the true nature of the relevant property rights. I collaborated very closely with Alain Karsenty – a social economist working for CIRAD²¹, the French research center for international agricultural and development questions – and in 1996, I witnessed the adoption of the so-called GELOSE legislation by Madagascar’s government.

The law does not refer to “absolute property rights.” Instead, it authorizes the parties involved to negotiate resource management contracts, provided the relative security of property rights to land is guaranteed. In 2005 this step resulted in a more far-reaching land reform that permitted a trading office to be established in every municipality where so-called land certificates can be discussed and negotiated. The certificates are legally binding. They are legal documents that ensure the security of the transaction in the relevant administrative region, whereby the desire for more security naturally continues to be linked to the idea of (registered) land registry titles. The certificates provide an interesting middle course between communal management by like-minded people and land titles freely exchangeable on the market, but they are also called into question precisely for this reason. The experience in Madagascar has attracted a great deal of attention internationally, but has not been reproduced elsewhere.

Commons Re-emerge in France, Too

My other world of experience stems from the fact that since the mid-1970s, I have been thinking about how a scientific approach that up to then was exclusively Africanistic could be applied to French (or European) society. The basic idea was to establish legal anthropology, which was still an exotic field, “at home,” too, to get beyond ethnocentric perspectives. And while I was asking myself time and again what law actually was, I developed the idea to expand the fieldwork I had done in Senegal in 1969 and then in the Congo in 1972/73. I was looking for ways in which collective aspirations and communitarian practices were expressed in France – in the relationship between humans and land, and then in negotiations for managing conflicts in France’s juvenile justice system of the 1980s.

In exploring this question, I selected my own ethnic group as the object of investigation, since my cultural belonging made it easy for me to access certain pieces of information and behavior patterns; also, the people of Picardy in northern France are renowned for their consuetudinary law and I had privileged access to detailed information about a specific area within Picardy, the medieval county of Vermandois: it was genealogical material, “commonplace books,” a kind of calendar in which all economic activities, all sales and purchases, all work activities, special weather or political events, even laborers’ jokes, were recorded. The commonplace books as well as the business managers’ records provided the key to understanding how communal practices were retained in a world of farming that was increasingly subject to the capitalist market.

This world fell victim to the trenches on the Somme in 1916, which destroyed the historical legacy as well as the architecture and the landscape of the area.²² Since the eighteenth century, private property had become increasingly powerful in this region of the world. And in the nineteenth century, it continued to spread, but various social and legal practices still bore witness to common points of reference, to the obligation to “keep something jointly,” just as one “keeps company.” For example, commoning means sharing the art of hunting, the social protocols of weddings and funerals, the patronage of one’s own clients and workers, and all the traditions that express social belonging and solidarity in the face of life and death. In France as in Africa, the local agricultural milieu is rich in family relationships and professional ones. And just as in Africa, the limitations on one’s behavior that this entails are experienced and perceived intensely, but not mentioned – and certainly not to a stranger.

Pluralism is a condition for a community to function harmoniously, but this is usually not made a topic of discussion as such. My interviewees agreed in that regard, yet they had never thought about the problem of land from a pluralist perspective before! Examining the structure of ownership revealed that in the villages where I worked, everything belonged to someone. Not a single place was unowned. The land is expensive and among the best in France. Giving away even the smallest portion of land is unthinkable. And indeed there were only a few communal organizational structures in the swamp landscapes along the rivers running through the area.

Yet the physical areas devoted to specific common activities bear witness to longstanding common practices even on “private property,” e.g., playing fistball or gathering forest fruits. That was my first lesson. It was to be confirmed in the Amiénois, my own area of Picardy: a “common” function which is thus inherent and not made explicit can be superimposed on a right of ownership that is exclusive and absolute in principle. That function would then limit the exercise of this right, to the benefit of all members of a certain community insofar and as long as this function requires it. In the absence of players, for example, the fistball fields were transformed into community squares, flowerbeds, places for storing materials, and the like.²³ Functional logic triumphs over institutional logic!

These practices illustrate that notions about common space that usually remain in the dark emerge when one starts to look at common uses and the sharing of places. These notions about space are familiar in African societies, but have been forgotten here in Europe where geometrical notions about space dominate. Geometrical notions lead to the surveying and measuring of space, thus enabling people to assign an exchange value to the measure and finally to marketize what has been surveyed and measured (Le Roy 2011); social uses disappear from view. In a topocentric concept, by contrast, all spaces are identifiable by a place (location, point) that retain their own functional identities. These spaces can overlap if they fulfill different functions, and they can create borders and even territories if the functions are similar. The functions may be political, economic, religious, or otherwise. All of this characterizes how a territory is formed.

In other words, one can observe how commons with different functions overlap in a single area. At the same time, a physical space is generally assigned to concrete ownership rights according to the rules of positive law. Of course, such “layerings” of the law with various forms of control complicate the understanding of the people’s culture and their networks. After all, fundamentally speaking, as soon as we enter into the logic of the commons, some of our accustomed mechanisms for interpreting the functioning of a society and its formal regulatory authorities fail. At times, all they can do is represent information in a distorted way – or more likely, as caricatures.

I returned to Michel Alliot’s analyses (2003), in which he asserted that a community shares in three ways: areas of life, a particular type of behavior, and a decision area. This threefold sharing makes communities potentially totalitarian if the practices of sharing are not corrected by plural belongings and identities. By default, as a fact of life, we live in many worlds simultaneously, after all: family, school, political circles, professional life, sports, etc. In each of these worlds, we have a status of our own and an identity of our own. Even if societies transformed by market-oriented norms and state control no longer recognize traditional, communal, threefold sharing as a general rule, practices of sharing continues to flourish among communities comprised of people with multiple part-time identities. I call these groups “neo-communities.”

A supplement to Le Monde of April 4, 2014, on sustainable development, with the suggestive title “Betting on sharing,” took up the commons from the perspective of “alternative consumption.” Above all, it sketched the effects of carpooling and forms of living in cooperatives as promoted in France by the ALUR Act (Law on access to housing and urban redevelopment) following the German model. Journalist Marie-Béatrice Baudet commented that “customs are changing, especially among young people. That is certain, but not yet a revolution.” She quoted Remy Oughiry of the opinion research institute IPSOS: “The followers of collaborative consumption do not reject the consumer society at all. They simply want to regain control over it.” And Oughiry added, “The desire to own property remains very strong.”

Just as Monsieur Jourdain in Molière’s The Bourgeois Gentleman (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) discovered that he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it, we have been practicing commoning through and in our common experiences that we no longer call common. After all, under the influence of neoliberalism, the concept of community has been transformed in French political debate into something negative, an antithesis to the idea of the good life and a negative buzzword in the political debate, with all the side effects that entails (Hatzfeld 2011).

As a result, we are confronted with a difficulty that I linked to an enigma in the land question at the beginning of this chapter. We participate in sharing behaviors that are often long-lasting, but are not identified as commoning. And if people try to name these behaviors, then tend to use terms like “common good,” which have a convenient semantic and political ambiguity but may in fact be undermined by the legal realities. In civil law, a good is a thing in private possession and which can be disposed of at will in any way desired, while a commons must remain intact as a collective resource and cannot be sold at will. For this reason, I will devote the final section of this essay to the legal status of the commons. In principle, this would require that new categories and legal concepts be introduced, but I will refrain from doing so due to a lack of space.

The Legality of the Commons

The commons, singular or plural²⁴, confront us with two problems: the fact that the law is silent, and yet a torrent of legal words purports to regulate what existing law cannot regulate effectively at all. This obvious contradiction requires a kind of anthropological demystification of the state of the law in order to clarify the difficulties of conventional law in managing commons.

The fact that lawyers abuse the law is explained by the very practices of their profession. Still, a majority of citizens continue to trust formal law to deal with problems that it can hardly grasp, or not at all. That is not acceptable. My anthropological experience as a researcher makes me concede that formal law, which we claim is universal in human thinking, is nothing but a construct that credibly corresponds to a particular temporal and local situation and has endured for several generations (for example, in Rome). In Europe, it is only since the seventeenth century that people have come to believe that law can take on a life of its own, largely independent of human agency and more and more specialized, finally brokering an alliance between the state and the market. Bound to political and economic power in this way, and in the course of the colonial adventures of the nineteenth century, this originally Western form of law has now spread to the entire world. Yet the rule of weapons and capital cannot make us forget that what is called “law,” and what goes hand in hand with the modern state, does not correspond to the experiences of three or four billion of our contemporaries around the world. For them, law instead triggers their mistrust and resistance.

In terms of the history of mankind, the law is only a folk law, a local interpretation of a process that is much more general. I call this process legality, or juricidité. If this legality is barely studied, it is because powerful political, economic and ideological interests prevent it. They are the same interests that do not permit the commons to be apprehended and named.

In addition, there is a problem in how to characterize law. If only the law itself is considered as autonomous (Le Roy 2009) – and if its interpreters derive normative categories from it and can treat them semantically as categories of law – then other experiences, whether they are Confucian, indigenous, Muslim, animist, or other traditions, are in principle heteronomous.²⁵ They may resemble law, but they are instead based on social traditions. Legality, by contrast, is identifiable in and through those practices that can be held legally responsible by an authority that is nominally empowered by the group itself to exercise appropriate sanctions. Legality in this sense is tautological because its grounding in social practice may or may not even exist!

This apparent lack of formal recognition of what is and is not law is deeply unsettling to European minds, especially for the Cartesian ones. For they tend to practice a kind of juridification (juridisme), to use Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) term. Bourdieu considers this a bad habit of anthropologists and others – to formulate legal rules and thus orient rules along the particular conventions of the law in cases where there is actually only habitus, i.e., material for representing structural conditions of existence, preferences that are stable over time. For this reason, it is imperative that two things be respected: on the one hand, not to consider anything to be law which is actually only a standard enacted and recognized by the state (in other words, what is called positive law); and on the other hand, to treat everything else that emerges organically from communities as an authentic product of legality as relevant phenomena: the li²⁶ and fa²⁷ of Confucianism, the Hindu Dharma,²⁸ the Muslim Fiqh²⁹ and Sharia, customs and traditions, etc. Laws belong to the legal order and are its dominant expression, but other forms of social expression and regulation have always existed as well, and will continue to unfold – in particular, forms that regulate the relationships among people in managing their shared wealth. It is precisely these practices that we need to use if we are to enable people to “be commoners” and to take paths that are secured in a different way – not purely through the legality of laws and property rights. If we think that legality offers inappropriate answers, then we must rely on innovative forms of the legal order. And it is up to us to invent them.³⁰

From the Law to Control: About Masteries for Exploring a New Legal Order

Two innovations have already been put up for discussion. I now come back here to legal dominance and control over soil and resources. The idea has taken hold that one could exercise a right to land (ius in re) or could have a claim to be allotted a plot of land or to be a creditor. It has taken hold so firmly that it is difficult to admit that this, too, is only a specific product of our way of thinking. In this way of thinking, law becomes autonomous; it is considered something independent. It is also a condition for constituting the autonomy of the individual in society. The great adventures of democracy in England, America and France are all based on important declarations of rights. Other cultural traditions tend to try and conceive of human beings as parts of complex networks in their interactions with and their obligations toward others, as well as in their ability to mobilize these networks.

In order to do justice to both approaches, I have decided to use an intercultural concept, that of maîtrise,³¹ of dominance and control, which I first define as follows:

The concept of control mastery suggests a power and a force that grants particular responsibility to those who reserve the rights to a territory more or less exclusively because they are actually affected by what happens there. The concept permits sovereignty and property to be combined – the two concepts provide a “frame” for the debate about land use (…) – by emphasizing that rights and responsibilities can arise from a concrete relationship to space [Translator’s note: Here: “land”] and that this responsibility must be retained or ensured at its core. (Le Roy 1995:489)

By taking up anthropological and intercultural aspects, this concept of control, following Catherine and Olivier Barrière, enables the establishment of “a system for managing the assets of socioecological relationships at the heart of the internal and external relationships of communities.” (Barrière & Barrière 2002:315)

This concept – as well as further clarity about the forms in which resources and their communal management are appropriated and used – enables us to evaluate what does and does not stem from a commons logic in accordance with the conventions of each group, community, or society at a particular moment in its history. As a scientific approach, this concept does not require an a priori definition of what commons are “in their essence.” Instead, it focuses our view on what people share, and it moves strategies of communal management to the center of attention.

Conclusion

Making commons come alive again in everyday life and in the economic and legal systems seems like a revolution that can be interpreted through two lenses. Is it a rediscovery of precapitalist and prestate organizational principles or is it a break with the current political order? Perhaps even this framing does not do justice to the issue. In the epilogue to their book quoted above, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval write: “Commons are the new political rationality that must replace the neoliberal rationality” (2014: 572). They regard revolution as the self-institution of society, an idea of Promethean dimensions of greatness.

I believe their most important hypothesis is summed up in the following quotation: “As a principle, commons define a norm of inappropriability. This indeed requires establishing all social relationships anew, with this idea as a starting point: Inappropriability does not mean… that it would be impossible to appropriate something, but that it is socially unacceptable to appropriate it. In other words, that appropriating something as one’s private property is not permitted because that thing is reserved for common use.” (Dardot and Laval 2014: 583) “There are no common goods; what matters is creating commons.”³²

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

References

Alliot, Michel. 2003 [1980]. “Modèles sociétaux : les communautés,” Le droit et le service public au miroir de l’anthropologie, Paris. Karthala. S. 73-78.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. Condition de l’homme global. Paris: Payot.

Barrière Catherine aund Olivier. 2002. Un droit à inventer. Foncier et environnement dans le delta intérieur du Niger. (Mali), Paris. IRD.

Bollier, David, 2014. La renaissance des communs, pour une société de coopération et de partage. Paris. Éditions Charles Léopold Mayer.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. “Habitus, code et codification, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Vol. 64, septembre, S. 40-44.

Dardot, Pierre aund Christian Laval. 2014. Commun, essai sur la révolution au XXI° siècle. Paris, Le Découverte.

Hatzfeld, Marc. 2011. Les lascars, une jeunesse en colère. Paris. Autrement, 2011.

Le Roy, Étienne. 1970. Système foncier et développement rural, essai d’anthropologie juridique sur la répartition des terres chez les Wolof ruraux de la zone arachidière nord, Sénégal. DiplomarbeitPH Dissertation. FDSE Paris. Ronéo.

———. 1995. “Le pastoralisme africain face aux problèmes fonciers,” Daget Philippe, Godron Michel, editors, Pastoralisme; Troupeaux, espaces, societies. Paris. Hatier AUPELF-UREF, S. 487-510.

———. (with A. Karsenty und A. Bertrand). 1996. La sécurisation foncière en Afrique, pour une gestion viable des ressources renouvelables. Paris. Karthala.

———. 1999. “Au delà de la relation public-privé, l’apparition de la notion de ‘communs’ dans les expériences actuelles de décentralisation administrative en Afrique francophone,” in Rösel Jacob und von Trotha, Trutz (Hg..), Dezentralisierung, Demokratisierung und die lokale Repräsentation des Staates. Köln, Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, S. 69-78.

———. 2009. “Autonomie du droit, hétéronomie de la juridicité.” In Sacco Rodolfo, editor, Le nuove ambizioni del sapere del giurista: anthropologica giuridica e traducttologia giuridica. Rome. Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, Atti dei convegni Lincei 253, S. 99-133.

———. 2011. La terre de l’autre, une anthropologie des régimes d’appropriation foncière. Paris, LGDJ, col. Droit et société, série anthropologie.

———. 2014 [2012]. “Sous les pavés du monologisme juridique, prolégomènes anthropologiques.” In Parance et al. 2014. S. 81-101.

Parance Béatrice. Saint Victor Jacques de, editors. 2014. Repenser les biens communs. Paris, CNRS éditions. Saïd Mahamouadou, 2009. Foncier et société aux Comores. Paris. Karthala.

Étienne Le Roy (France) is emeritus Professor of Legal Anthropology at the University Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris 1 where he has directed the research Laboratory for Legal Anthropology of Paris from 1988 to 2007 and Curricula of African Studies, from 1993 to 2003. Since the mid-Sixties he has devoted his fieldwork to the study of land tenure systems and policies governing the appropriation of territories in Africa. Among many publications, Le jeu des lois, (Paris, LGDJ, 1999) offers his theoretical contribution to a legal “dynamic” anthropology and La terre de l’autre, une anthropologie des régimes d’appropriation foncière is the synthesis of forty years of research on land issues.

Photo by Rosmarie Voegtli

The post Patterns of Commoning: How I Have Been Conducting Research on the Commons for Thirty Years Without Knowing It appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is the prospect we’ve been trying to understand for the last decade. In the next two years, we aim to ground our ideas for a commons transition on stronger empirical evidence.

The main questions we’ll try to answer, which make for four different projects, follow:

• First, the Phygital project seeks to understand how globally designed products could change how we work, produce and consume and study the sustainability potential of a commons-based mode of production..
• Second, Transvestment attempts to figure out how commoners can become economically sustainable.
• Third, Wikiart explores whether a theatrical play or a piece of music, inspired by the social design of Wikipedia, could be developed as a digital commons.
• Fourth, the Deschooling project sets out to investigate how commons-based peer production could change our educational system(s).

The P2P lab is sustained on a modest budget and is financially sustainable till September 2019. Thus, in parallel with our research endeavours we will be working towards successful research funding. Of course, we are constantly on the look-out for co-operation on interesting projects and will gladly provide our services in a pro-bono manner if the output is a commons.

Find out more about the P2P lab here.

Photo by Erik Schepers

The post The P2P Lab’s Plan for 2018-19 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Ambika Kandasamy: Cognitive neuroscientist Christopher Madan says open-access data or data that is freely shared among researchers to use in their studies can not only save time and money, it can enable scientists to “skip straight to doing analysis and then drawing conclusions from it,” if the datasets they need already exist. Madan works as an assistant professor at the University of Nottingham in England, where he studies the impact of aging in the brain, focusing specifically on memory. He started using open-access data in his work about three years ago.

Given the stiff competition for funding, scientists like Madan are turning to open-access data as a way to expedite their own research process as well as the work of others in the field. Madan says there are various benefits to using open-access data in research — namely, it provides researchers with large and diverse datasets that might otherwise be difficult to obtain independently. This pre-existing data could help them make inferences about generalizing the results of their studies to larger populations, he says. Making research data freely available, however, isn’t such a straightforward process. In some cases, especially when researchers use patient data in studies, they must take steps to anonymize it, he says, adding that “we also need to have balance, so we don’t become too dependent on specific open datasets.”

We spoke with Madan about how he uses open-access data in his research.

Ambika Kandasamy, Shareable: I attended a talk you gave at the MIT Media Lab in August about some of the benefits of sharing research material such as MRI datasets with other researchers. What compelled you to move towards this open and shared approach?

Christopher Madan: To some degree, I’m more a consumer of open data than adding to it. The main plus is that the data is already there. Instead of, I have an idea and then I have to acquire the data — both applying for grants or somehow getting the money side sorted and then having a research assistant to put in the actual time to get them — people to come in and be scanned. Scanners are kind of expensive. All of this would take, on the optimistic side, I’d say several months or more into years, if I wanted to get a sample size of like three, four hundred people.

But for the sake of just looking at age, datasets exist. It can take a few minutes to download, maybe into hours depending on which one and how much other data I have to sort through to organize it into a way that is more how I want the data organized to be analyzed. It’s still in the scale of hours and maybe days versus months to years. Then the analysis on that going forward is the same at that point.

In an article in the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience journal, you wrote that “open-access data can allow for access to populations that may otherwise be unfeasible to recruit — such as middle-age adults, patients, and individuals from other geographic regions.” Could you elaborate on that?

The maybe more surprising one of those is the middle-age adults. People in their 30s to 50s could generally have jobs and families and are busy, so it’s harder to get them to be in research studies. If we’re interested in aging, getting young adults that are effectively university student age, they’re relatively easy to be recruited in university studies because they’re walking down the halls of the same places that the research is done. Older adults, to some degree, can be easier to recruit. … But middle age adults have a lot less flexibility of their time. Even if they’re interested, they have a lot of other commitments that they have to balance. It’s just harder to get them into research studies. Now, it’s not that they’re impossible to get. It’s just effectively lower odds for that demographic. If people have already spent the effort of trying to get them in, then we should take advantage of that data and not just use it for one study and that’s it, but answer multiple research questions and try to get more out of the same data that’s already been collected.

In the article, you also mentioned that you keep a list of open-access datasets of structural MRIs on GitHub. Have other researchers contributed to this list?

Yes, they have. I initially made a list of basically just stuff that I knew. One morning, I was like, “maybe I should do this.” I was keeping track of things, but every so often, new datasets get shared. How much can you keep in your head or keep the PDFs related to these in a folder? It’s not that great of an organization. So I thought, maybe I’ll make a list where I’ll say the name — some of them have shorter abbreviations, so a spelled out version, a link to where that data actually is, a link to the paper that kind of describes it, some notes about what kind of MRIs are with it or how many individuals are included in it, the demographics — is it all young adults or old adults — that sort of information. I basically just made a list of it and put that online. Other people found it useful. Some people needed parts of that but not others, or generally didn’t think about open-access data as much until that point. Here’s a list of them. You can look up what’s there and what might be useful to you and take advantage of it.

Since then, some that I basically didn’t include, that I didn’t know of or didn’t think of or whichever, that other people are involved in, they requested to add themselves to the list, and I approved that. Other ones, people that aren’t just involved in the data collection of it, but knew of that weren’t in the list, contributed to it. It’s grown a bit since then, particularly I’ll say from other people’s additions, which also shows other people are looking at it and making a note of it. At least you can have people favorite it for later. I think it’s about 2,000 or so people have. I think maybe eight, nine people have actively added new things to it, so it’s growing a bit. Again, it is a bit of a specialized topic and resource, but other people have found it useful, so that does kind of show that it’s not just a list that I made for myself, but other people have found some benefit in this as well.

How could this kind of open-access data accelerate the process of scientific discovery?

I think the main thing is just after having some idea about what datasets exist — as soon as you have some sort of research idea and you can match it onto something of that sort — you can just download the data. In some cases you have to do an application, so maybe there’s a week or something when someone needs to approve that you’re using this for valid purposes, but you can skip straight to doing analysis and then drawing conclusions from it and writing up a research paper if it went somewhere, rather than having things be drawn out for probably several years.

From your own experience, have you noticed any trends over the years in data sharing among researchers?

There’s definitely more open data now than there used to be. That’s great, both in terms of more people using it, but also just more people sharing whatever data they’ve been collecting anyway. From more personal analysis, talks with researchers that have not shared data yet, but have been thinking about it for data they’ve already been collecting — can they share it because in terms of consent of what the initial participants gave? Would that include sharing of their data when that wasn’t explicitly asked? Even if that doesn’t and they’re working with more medical kind of patient data, then you can still plan forward and say, “okay, what do we need to add?” A couple of extra sentences to the consent form to allow for this at this point forward even if we can’t do it retrospectively. People are thinking about it even beyond just what’s kind of more apparent in terms of what data is actually available today — little more behind the scenes. The field is shifting in that direction. It’ll just continue along that trajectory.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Photo of Madan [top] by Dan Lurie and [left] by Yang Liu. This is part of Shareable’s series on the open science movement. Further reading:

How the Mozilla Science Lab is improving access to research and data

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Open Access Scholarly Publishing

For generations, scientists and scholars have used scholarly journals to share their latest research discoveries and theories. These journals – usually run by commercial publishers selling subscriptions to university libraries and research institutes – provide the easiest, most efficient way for academic disciplines to advance their collective knowledge.

But the arrival of the Internet and digital technologies has called into question the expense and information restrictions of this commercially driven system. Thanks to digital publishing, it has become far cheaper and easier for a field of researchers to share their specialized research with anyone on the planet. To be sure, there are still costs associated with editing a journal and the peer review of articles, but Web-based publishing has radically reduced (and sometimes eliminated) the expenses of print production, distribution and marketing.

Most commercial journal publishers, not surprisingly, have seen these developments as a troubling threat to their business models. They have continued to assert strict copyright control over articles, putting them behind Web paywalls and charging high subscription fees. In short, they have limited access to research that could otherwise be made freely available – research that taxpayer money has often financed.

In the early 2000s, a variety of academic researchers in the US and Europe began to address this significant problem by starting the open access, or OA, movement in scholarly publishing. Its goal has been to make academic research freely and openly available to anyone in perpetuity. Open access advocates have had to pioneer new revenue models for academic journal publishing, overcome the limitations of copyright law by using Creative Commons licenses,¹ and fight fierce opposition from commercial publishers, uninformed politicians and slow-moving university administrators.

Happily, these strong, sustained efforts to reclaim research from profit-driven publishers and reclaim it for the academic commons have had many great successes. The open access journals started by the Public Library of Science in 2003² have been followed by thousands of other publications that honor open access in one fashion or another. One example is the International Journal of the Commons,³ an open access journal published by the International Association for the Study of the Commons. Major funders of scientific research, including governments, have started to require that research be published under OA principles, and commercial journals have allowed academics to self-archive their work in open access repositories. Some of the largest journal publishers have themselves started OA journals, joining a small group of niche publishers that have pioneered OA publishing as a profitable enterprise.

As of July 2015, the Directory of Open Access Journals had indexed 10,354 open access, peer-reviewed journals that had published more than 1.8 million articles. A flood of major research universities, including Harvard University, now require their faculty to publish works under open access principles. While there remain many challenges in making scientific and scholarly research more accessible, open access journals have become one of the most significant success stories in reclaiming and reinventing knowledge commons.

 – David Bollier

Book Publishing as a Commons for Regional Culture

Dissatisfied with the costs and slowness of conventional book publishing, some newcomers are trying to re-introduce the craft, care and social relationships that once prevailed in the field. One of the most innovative examples is Levellers Press, a worker-owned and -managed co-operative in Amherst, Massachusetts (USA), the offshoot of a regional photocopying business, Collective Copies.

Levellers Press – inspired by the seventeenth-century commoners who denounced the privatization of common lands and called for greater equality – wants to give authors new opportunities to reach readers, and first-time authors new opportunities to publish. This means changing the relationships among publishers, authors and readers. As one local observer put it, “It’s something of a throwback to a different era, when publishers were also printers and worked more closely with writers on their books – and when books were produced not just for the sales potential but for their literary and informative value.”⁴

The authors who publish their books through Levellers Press usually live in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts. Many Levellers books cover regional topics that might not otherwise find a book publisher. Levellers’ first book, for example, was Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, by a retired Amherst College professor, Robert Romer. Since its inception in 2009, Levellers has published more than fifty books on a wide range of topics – fiction, poetry memoirs, social issues, health. Books are sold in local markets as well as via the Levellers and Amazon websites.

Two factors have been critical to Levellers’ success – its skillful use of new technologies to develop a new publishing model, and its founder, Steve Strimer, a worker-owner of Collective Copies since 1997. Strimer realized that the publishing marketplace was changing radically, and that a niche printer such as Collective Copies could prosper by pioneering a new form of regional publishing. New types of software, printers, scanners and bindery machines now make it possible for a small enterprise like Levellers to do print runs of 100 to 200 books for less than $10 a copy.

Such small-batch “print on demand” publishing helps avoid costly, unsold inventory while also giving unproven authors an opportunity to find their voice and reach readers. This publishing model also allows great flexibility in meeting unpredictable consumer demand. If a spurt of interest arises for Vital Aging, a guide for older people, or Girls Got Kicks, a popular photo-documentary book about “badass females,” Levellers can quickly print a few dozen copies within a few days for a very low cost. Most Levellers’ authors sell between 200 and 300 copies. After The Wealth of the Commons was rejected by a dozen conventional publishers, Levellers agreed to publish the book in 2012 and welcomed the editors’ use of a Creative Commons license. The book went on to sell well and earn a profit for the worker cooperative.

Authors like the Levellers publishing model because it is simple and fair: Levellers absorbs the startup costs of layout, design and printing for any book it chooses to publish, and the author gets no advance payment and must do most of the marketing. But once production costs have been recouped – usually after sales of 100 to 150 books – the author and publisher split all revenues 50-50. This is a far better deal for authors than the usual royalty rates of 7 to 12 percent. Levellers also has a self-publishing arm called Off the Common Books, which assists authors in printing and marketing books themselves. This was a perfect arrangement for Patterns of Commoning because of the greater author autonomy, low pricing, open licensing and production control that Off the Common Books makes possible.

Levellers has enriched the western Massachusetts area by carving out a viable new market for books of local interest – memoirs by community personalities, biographies, histories, recipe books, and many other books of quirky authenticity. Strimer concedes that he does not need to be as market-focused as conventional publishers to be profitable, and that is mostly the point: the Levellers publishing model blends financial practicality with localism, and makes book publishing a feasible creative outlet for a diverse roster of people who might not otherwise become authors.

 – David Bollier

A Community of Commoners in the Guise of a Magazine

The first time the printing presses were fired up for Oya, the word “crisis” followed “print media” like a mantra. Since March 2010, thirty issues of this young magazine from Germany have been published every two months. Oya emboldens readers to forge new paths in living a “good life.” Yet the editors do not themselves decide what a “good life” is supposed to be, but instead set out on an expedition with their readers. The journey winds a varied trail from open workshops and urban gardens to art in public spaces and communal residential projects. The magazine has gone to ecovillages, farms practicing eco-responsible agriculture, and schools in the wild.

Commons principles lie at the core of the projects. They all depend upon voluntary contributions, communal action, self-organization, self-determination and a diversity of participants. As the motto of Oya’s online edition (www.oya-online.de) puts it, “Much more interesting than a bunch of like-minded people is a community of differently minded people.” While Oya tends to focus on practical applications, it is also a thoughtful and reflective magazine. Its essays question the foundations of contemporary thinking and squarely face up to failures and disillusionment.

The magazine has been published every two months since March 2010 with a lively layout and strong photos, and of course, on eco-friendly paper. Roughly 90 percent of the print edition is available online under a copyleft license, the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA). The project is run by Oya Medien eG, a cooperative whose preamble states that its goal is not to enrich its members, but to publish a meaningful magazine. Oya has a large and loyal following that warrants print runs of 10,000 copies – a cost financed mostly by subscriptions, advertising and sales at select railway news stands. One tenth of the magazine’s 4,000 subscribers are members of the cooperative and support it with shares of 200 Euros each: an impressive show of support, but not quite enough to make the magazine financially stable. That will require 5,000 subscriptions. In the meantime, the editorial staff, administrators, and authors made substantial gifts to the magazine in the early years in the form of their work.

Oya is not a glossy lifestyle magazine designed to promote a bit of sustainable consumption. It is a magazine by and for activist-minded people who are deeply concerned with the state of the world and want to make a real difference. In this sense, Oya is far more than a magazine. It is a community of commoners trying to develop and share commons-based ways of living and forms of economic activity that can thrive in a world framed by climate change and Peak Oil.

 – Lara Mallien

A Growing Network of Commons-Oriented Magazines

A number of magazines are starting to provide regular coverage of the commons and companion-movements. In the United Kingdom, STIR magazine, for “stir to action,” has introduced a fresh, vigorous voice to the coverage of politics, culture and social transformation. In addition to its coverage of co-operatives, open source projects and alternative economics, STIR has focused a great deal on the commons movement and its initiatives. Like Oya, STIR has re-imagined the idea of a magazine as a focal point for bringing together an active community of reader/activists/thinkers. Many small, local projects with great potential are woven together to suggest hopeful new visions for the future.

Another notable British publication on the commons is The Commoner, edited by Massimo De Angelis. The website is a rich body of Web commentary and analyses from an autonomous Marxist political lens. Since May 2001, The Commoner has published fifteen substantive collections of essays exploring how the commons is relevant to care work, domestic labor, free software, energy, money, the body and value, among other topics. The Commoner explains that it is “about living in a world in which the doing is separated from the deed, in which this separation is extended in an increasing numbers of spheres of life, in which the revolt about this separation is ubiquitous.”

In the US, several web and print magazines are providing valuable coverage of the commons. Shareable, based in the Bay Area, is a Web magazine with plentiful, cutting-edge coverage of developments in the “sharing and collaborative economy.” Shareable has pioneered the idea of “shareable cities” with a set of detailed policies, and organized dozens of projects to promote alternative local projects and activism. Yes! Magazine – the magazine for alternative futures – features an ongoing series of articles on “commonomics,” the development of local alternatives, from local co-ops to public banks to community-owned solar projects. On the Commons magazine, published from Minneapolis, generally focuses on the great variety of North American commons, giving special attention to placemaking initiatives, water commons and organizing efforts.

Kosmos, a beautifully designed quarterly magazine with an international readership, has frequently focused on the commons as part of a larger agenda of building a “planetary civilization and world community.” Published out of the Berkshires in Massachusetts, Kosmos also explores transformational leadership and spiritual dimensions of making change.

The Case for the Commons is a bimonthly e-publication that explores the implications of dozens of judgments and orders about the commons passed by the Indian Supreme Court, High Court and state governments. Produced by the Foundation for Ecological Security in India, the e-publication interprets and popularizes the legal rulings, with an eye toward improving commons governance.

In Latin America, Pillku – “lovers of freedom” – is an online magazine about free technology and culture, commons, good living, collaboration and commun­ity property. It is published quarterly by Código Sur, a nonprofit organization whose purpose, among others, is to assist the development and socialization of these concerns by providing basic funding and technical infrastructure. The Pillku website provides a collaborative space for debate on free culture and commons in Latin America and seeks to build a society based on the freedom to share. Although it meets the standards of scientific and scholarly journals, Pillku as an organization and magazine is dedicated to collective creation, even in its editing processes. Most of the work needed to produce Pillku is voluntary. Contributions to the website come from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, generating a vast commons of information and building relationships among various projects. The extended Pillku community and editorial board are comprised of committed social organizations in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Mexico.

In India, Pratham Books is a not-for-profit publisher that has the avowed mission of “putting a book in every child’s hand.” It is an outgrowth of the “Read India Movement,” which seeks to cultivate a joy of reading among children and encourage education. Identifying a lack of affordable, quality books for children in India, Pratham Books has set out to publish inexpensive books in English and ten other Indian languages. It works with a range of partners – a foundation, a conservation group, social media enterprises and other publishers – to reach children. To date, it has published over 280 titles and over 12 million books.

Of course, there are also a wide number of blogs and websites devoted to the commons. The leading academic website on the commons include those run by the International Association for the Study of the Commons, founded by the late Professor Elinor Ostrom, and the Digital Library on the Commons, which hosts an extensive collection of documents. Another much-used resource is the P2P Foundation’s blog and wiki, a vast archive of materials about digital peer production, the commons and related fields.

 – David Bollier and Santiago Hoerth Moura

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

Photo by brewbooks

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Unlike conventional approaches to local economic development, which centre on economic growth and are led from the top down, community economic development (CED) is a process that is led by local residents and focuses on generating wealth and jobs that stay local.

This two year programme, led by Co-operatives UK, supported 71 communities across England to develop and implement plans to shape their local economy.

The report finds that CED is a way to give people real power in the local area and interest in the approach is growing in the context of calls for more ‘control’ in local areas and the reduction in inequality. It also highlights that the most effective approaches to CED focus the community’s energies on taking control of a particular asset or building on existing local plans to transform processes not previously working for the local community.

However, it also concludes with three challenges that need to be addressed to make CED more effective on implementation.

• CED plans do not always align with conventional measures of economic development.  For them to cut- through a shift is needed in what is measured, from single growth measures to wider well-being and local wealth.
• CED plans can be overlooked. They should be embedded within wider policy processes like Neighbourhood Planning and LEP planning, and could be given a statutory footing, to ensure it has legitimacy with stakeholders who held power or mandate.
• CED plans take time. It is important that there is sufficient time and resources in place to develop and implement CED plans

The community economic development programme was funded by the Department for Communities and Local Government, and delivered in partnership with Locality, New Economics Foundation, CLES and Responsible Finance.

Reposted from Co-operatives’s UK website.

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The research that is prioritised and funded today will have a decisive impact on the future of our societies and our planet. Our societies face immense environmental, social and economic challenges as exemplified by the ambitious sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2030 agenda.

It is certainly no time for ‘business as usual’, and radical change is needed for the European Union (EU) to address these challenges, such as climate change, food security, antimicrobial resistance, decent jobs for all and rising inequalities.

As civil society organisations, we urge a reassertion of our core values, such as peace, democracy, participation, equality, social justice, solidarity and sustainability at the heart of the European project.

EU research policy: for peace, people and planet

A Civil Society perspective on the next EU Research Framework Programme (FP9)

Brussels, 3 July 2017 – Civil society groups call for the next EU Research policy to shift its focus from jobs, growth and competitiveness to delivering global public goods for its citizens.

“With a needs-driven research agenda, the EU could concretely deliver impact for its citizens, address today’s societal and environmental challenges and contribute to a sustainable future for Europe. It could pave the way for the transition to a low carbon economy, sustainable food and farming systems and the development of new affordable health technologies,” says Fanny Voitzwinkler, Head of the EU office of Global Health Advocates.

Research that will make Europe and the world an environmentally sustainable, healthy and peaceful place to live must now be prioritised over research that delivers profit and economic return. The belief that boosting industry’s competitiveness will create jobs and ‘trickle down’ to the benefit of all people is misleading.

“Substantial portions of EU Research funds have been turned into subsidies for large corporations at a time when essential public risk assessment and research institutions are facing budget cuts. This is not acceptable: industry subsidisation is not what a public research policy should be about,” says Martin Pigeon, Research and Campaigner at Corporate Europe Observatory.

Private profitability is not a sufficient measure of public benefits – a position also defended by several renowned economists and confirmed by the widening levels of inequalities within our societies.

“At a time when the EU needs to reconnect with citizens, this next research programme should ensure full public return on public investments. There is need for real democratic and participatory decision-making to enable greater accountability over the use of public funds and ensure they have social and environmental impact. Public funds should not be used for military spending,” says Leida Rijnhout, Resources Justice and Sustainability Programme Coordinator at Friends of the Earth Europe.

Proposals for defence to become a much more prominent EU research area post 2020 represents a fundamental shift of the EU from a civilian peace-oriented project to a military-led one, with significant implications for the founding principles set out in the EU treaties.

“The EU is a peace project. There can be no place for military research. The EU should invest in research projects which contribute to the peaceful prevention and resolution of conflicts rather than subsidise research for arms production,” warns Laëtitia Sédou, European Programme Officer at the European Network Against Arms Trade.

To download the full paper, click here.

Photo by dalobeee

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Frankenstein reproduction right

With the original objective of “protecting equality, press and informed news”, the proposed “publishers right”, or “ancilliary copyright” could very well turn into an unbounded and unrestricted ‘frankenstein reproduction right’ that goes far beyond existing copyright’s “orginality requirements”. The proposed “reproduction right” is radically different from existing copyright law where the originality requirement prevents the appropriation of facts, ideas and non-original expression which are usually not considered to be protected by copyright. Many amendments on the table today before the Legal Affairs Committee aim at prohibiting the use of even the smallest bit or snippet of any text, image or sound from a press article, from public information or from an academic text without the prior permission of the publisher. The negative impact on access to information, access to knowledge and scientific scholarship could be devastating. We are facing a clear attack on our democratic rights as European citizens.

It should be noted that this new layer of copyright does not exist in the US nor in international copyright law.

“Closed science”, “Closed access” and “Closed data”

Many elements of articles 11 and 13 constitute a frontal attack on open science programmes as supported by the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament.

New filtering, policing, monitoring and payment obligations would significantly weaken access to valuable research content produced through public funding by creating extra costs, bureaucratical burdens and legal uncertainty for the academical community. These new legal obligations of intermediary liability would enter into direct conflict with the open science and open access policies that are being widely adopted in Europe and around the world. The aim of these policies is to increase access to research results in order to maximize the use and benefits of science across all sectors. To support open access and open science, universities, libraries and research organisations manage repositories in which researchers upload scientific articles, publications and research data so that everyone can benefit and use the results of research, including other researchers, industry and the public. A new filtering and payment obligations would significantly inhibit through legal uncertainty access to valuable research content produced through public funding, and greatly slow the progress of open science.

Crippling academic “open access” repositories

This new attempt at the enclosure of knowledge threatens the movement towards widespread availability of scientific results for the good of all, and the existence of over 1250 repositories that non-profit European institutions and academic communities use to disseminate academic output. It is important to note that, in the context of academic research, the creators of the content -the scientists- do not receive any financial compensation for their articles, yet publishers often demand that researchers sign over their copyright to the publishers.

Many universities maintain that a new intellectual property right for academic publishers would do “untold damage to the ability of researchers to share their findings and reference the world of scholarship in their published works” (LERU 2016).

Building walls around open data

Open data means that there are no legal restrictions to access to or use, modification and sharing of information for any purpose, subject at most to an obligation to attribute the source. ‘Open’ also means there are no technical restrictions to access and use, e.g. the data is offered in machine readable formats, and in open format rather than in a proprietary format. In contrast, Articles 11 and 13 directly and indirectly restrict the use of open data as well as difficulting open access which are flagship strategies of the EU and its Horizon 2020 research and innovation framework.

Restricting freedom of information

A key rationale that underpins freedom of expression is that the free flow of information is indispensable as it helps ensure that the best democratic decisions are taken. The right protects not just the imparting of ideas and information, but all phases of the communication process, from the gathering of information including a right to access sources, to the communication and reception of it. The legal implications of articles 11 and 13 could mean barriers to the access of citizens to news, public interest information and institutional data, all necessary for informed democratic debate. The public sector might very well automatically own a great deal of publishers intellectual property within its own publicly owned publications. To create exclusive rights in information for publishers will necessarily interfere with the freedom of expression of others. It should be noted that the European Charter of Fundamental Rights upholds a strict standard of scrutiny in the case of news and other public interest information.

In general the EU’s copyright reform has been hijacked by the publishing industry lobby and has been turned into copyright counter-reform that aims at further enclosing knowledge at the expense of our scientific, academic and cultural commons.

Photo by Mark Deckers

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