The oceans were the original global commons, shed and navigated for ages. But new technologies have added numerous challenges to sustaining our oceans: offshore oil drilling, deep-sea mining, and overfishing. However, it’s crucial that water, both freshwater and saltwater, remains a commons and held in the public trust, because access to clean and affordable water is a basic human right.

A widespread approach to delivering water to cities consists of establishing a municipal entity, under direct or indirect local governmental control, that collects water dues from all customers (residential as well as businesses). Water rates are determined through a political process, and are intended to provide affordable water supply and sewage treatment while covering the costs. Public water supplies of this kind are often highly successful, especially in countries where there are effective methods to keep local government accountable to its citizens. However, in some cases, municipal water utilities may become inefficient (providing a service of low quality or at high cost) if insufficient incentives are built into the system to ensure that the service is continually upgraded. In extreme cases, municipal utilities may fall seriously behind in provisioning growing cities, or may provide jobs as a form of political patronage.

One type of water distribution, beyond public and private, is a cooperative system, where the distribution system is owned by its customers. The existence of this alternative is too often ignored, but it is by no means rare. For example, in the U.S., there are over 3,000 rural water cooperatives, which were set up since the New Deal in order to cheaply build up and maintain a water supply infrastructure in the rural areas of the country.

Regardless of the ownership of a water utility (public, private, or cooperative), a utility may return polluted water to a river or the sea — especially if downriver users are not able to make an impact on decision-making. This points to the need for larger communities to assert their rights to clean water. —Emily Skeehan and Nikolas Kichler

1. Tarun Bharat Sangh: Fostering Community-driven Solutions to Secure Water Access and Rejuvenate Rivers

India makes up around 18 percent of the global population, and yet only has access to 4 percent of the world’s drinkable water resources, according to CNN. Since the 1980s, both rural and urban areas in the country have faced drinking-water shortages and crop failures. This scarcity is exacerbated by river pollution associated with sewage disposal and industrial waste. To address this crisis, in 1985, Rajendra Singh and others formed the local nongovernmental organization Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS, or Young India Organization) in Alvar, a rural district in Rajasthan.

TBS has worked with rural villagers to revive the use of traditional water-harvesting solutions. In particular, they used “johads” (small earthen reservoirs) to harvest rainwater in a way that reduced evaporation losses to substantially replenish local aquifers. People also shifted to organic farming techniques to make more efficient use of water. TBS advocated for these and other methods of water management as a way to bring about a culture of self-sufficiency to local farming communities. The River Arvari Parliament expanded on this objective. Following the revival of the Arvari River in 1990, representatives from the area’s 72 villages formed the transparent, community-driven “river parliament” to maintain the health of the river. To date, Rajasthan communities have created and managed more than 11,000 johads, replenishing more than 250,000 wells. Within 28 years, seven river systems that had been dried up for 80 years have been revived. —Nikolas Kichler

2. Resident Development Committees: Community-led Management Over Local Water Supplies

Among the African nations, Zambia is one of the most rapidly urbanizing countries in the continent. In its capital, Lusaka, 60 percent of the population live in unplanned settlements that are an urban and rural hybrid. This has led to extensive administrative challenges over clean water and public sanitation. In response, the Lusaka Water and Sewage Company, the Lusaka City Council, and various nongovernmental organizations worked together to develop Resident Development Committees (RDCs). The RDCs provide legal entities for local residents to foster cooperation with unplanned neighborhoods, thereby allowing planning, construction, and maintenance of water utilities to become self-organized and co-managed through them. Financial responsibilities, such as fee collection, are also under their jurisdiction. Over time, the RDCs have become the primary managing units for local collective decision-making over water issues, and have sustained a regular flow of information, transparency, and accountability to the communities they represent. Many neighborhoods now have access to a reliable and largely self-sustaining source of clean water. The benefits of RDCs for unplanned communities have been so convincing that formally planned areas are also advocating for the same model. Learn more from the review of Bangalore and Lusaka case studies, a paper on groundwater self-supply in Zambia, and this article on Zambia’s water service gap—Nikolas Kichler

3. depave: Communities Turning Pavement Into Green Public Space

Paved surfaces contribute to stormwater pollution, by directing rainwater with toxic urban pollutants to local streams and rivers. This, in turn, degrades water quality and natural habitats. Since Portland receives a lot of rain, impervious pavements are especially problematic for the city’s stormwater management. Two friends from Portland thought of a straightforward solution to this problem: remove as much impervious pavement as possible. They organized their first official depaving event in 2008. Since then, they formed depave, a nonprofit organization that promotes the removal of pavement from urban areas to address the harmful effects of stormwater runoff, as well as to create green public spaces. depave seeks out groups that are already community-oriented, such as schools and faith-based groups, and encourages them to work together on the same project. depave has coordinated over 50 depaving projects in Portland. Eric Rosewall, depave’s co-founder, reports the organization has depaved more than 12,500 square meters of asphalt since 2008, diverting an estimated 12,000 cubic meters of stormwater from storm drains. Over the years, depave has grown to support depaving across the Portland metro region and beyond, through their depave network training services. —Eric Rosewall (depave) and Adrien Labaeye

These three short case studies are adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.”

Photo by *SHERWOOD*

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Finding ways to democratically control our common wealth, from Quebec to India

Richard Swift: The commons is not just a battlefield between corporate predators and those who resist them – it is also a source of hope for those willing to imagine a world beyond capitalism. It represents a space between the private market and the political state in which humanity can control and democratically root our common wealth. Both the market and the state have proved inadequate for this purpose. In different ways, they have both led to a centralization of power and decision-making. Both private monopolies and state bureaucracies have proved incapable of maintaining the ecological health of the commons or managing the fair and equitable distribution of its benefits.

The conservative ecologist Garrett Hardin’s belief that the commons is facing a tragedy was based on the notion that individual self-interest in exploiting common resources was undercutting the overall health of those limited resources. Hardin maintained that individual self-interest trumps any more thoughtful notion of preserving resources for future use. External restraints needed to be imposed. To prove his point, Hardin used the example of the individual herder taking more than their share of pastureland. It assumes a human behavior that is all too familiar to those who have seen the global fishery depleted and seen watersheds destroyed by those hungry for land to grow crops.

Hardin’s solution was to divide up the commons into private property and public goods administered through the market and the state. But it scarcely seems to follow that if the commons is turned into private property or put under the supervision of some distant state bureaucracy that it will fare much better. These days, the two will likely form a ‘public-private partnership’ and any regime of fair-use regulation will go out the window.

There is also a question of scale. Is it better to have many small inshore artisanal fishers or to turn the fishery over to Big Capital and the high-tech trawler fleets? How could it make sense to push small farmers off food-producing land so that large biofuel producers can help keep our unsustainable love affair with the private automobile alive? When Hardin’s self-interested human nature is combined with large-scale private ownership, it is likely to yield ever more short-sighted results. It is no way to manage the commons.

Managing the Commons

It is far better to rethink how the commons is managed and to include as many of the players as possible so as to achieve a better result. If decisions rested with local communities or regions, in combination with users of various types both local and remote (environmentalists, fishers, miners, farmers, consumers), and were placed within a legal framework that takes future generations into account, it would seem likely to produce a more durable form of stewardship. This might also in the long run develop other potentialities of human behavior than the narrow self-interest that Hardin so feared.

An alternative to capitalism must in the end be based on a more complex sense of human nature than orthodox economists’ notion that we are all hardwired to a rational calculus of individual costs and benefits. The influential commons theorist Elinor Ostrom proposed a different, more optimistic, notion of the human potential for managing the commons. Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for her seminal 1990 work Governing the Commons. She believes that: “we live in a web of social relations infused with norms and values; we are intrinsically co-operative and as a result collective action is possible and may lead to sustainable and equitable governance practices.”

Ostrom does not commit herself to an ambitious political program of replacing state and market with more direct democratic practices. But she opens up the debate about how the commons should be governed rather than just assuming the market abetted by the state can handle the job. For Ostrom, a process of ‘deliberative democracy’ is essential if there is to be proper human stewardship of the commons. Others in the commons movement carry the analysis further and see in the commons the potential to restructure the underlying configuration of power between markets, states and societies.

Democratic Promise in Greece

This begins to give some indication of the democratic promise of the commons as a potential cornerstone in working out an alternative to capitalism. It takes on the ascendant neoliberalism of the commons privatizers while avoiding the dysfunctional effects of top-down state planning and centralized public ownership that have undercut previous efforts to build a socialism centered on the state. It moves beyond the sterile debate between an inadequate state and a rapacious market. Instead it explores the idea of a decentralized eco-democracy founded on what in the commons is vital to both human and biosphere survival. It extends democratic decision-making to ensure egalitarian economic outcomes. Here is one example of a commons-based popular initiative from Greece (made vulnerable to privatization pressure because of the debt crisis):

“In the Greek city of Thessaloniki, a coalition of citizens’ groups called Initiative 136 is creating a new organization to compete with Suez [a French water corporation] in the tender for the Rebuilding the alternatives Southern-style acquisition of the shares and the management of Thessaloniki’s Water and Sewerage Company. The dual goal is to prevent privatization and replace the model of state administration that has failed to protect the public character of water resources and infrastructure, and secure genuine democratic control of the city’s water by its citizens. The management would be organized through local co-operatives, with citizen participation. Initiative 136 is an effort to pre-empt privatization before it is implemented, with an attractive concrete alternative in the form of improved public management,” reports the website Municipal Services Project.

Multiply such initiatives many times and root them in the plethora of different struggles currently being waged over the commons and you start to get a sense of radical democratic promise. While the term ‘commons’ has many meanings, both spiritual and philosophical, it is explored here mainly as a political project. The core strategy is to design institutional arrangements that move beyond state and market and put the commons back into the service of society as a whole. The underlying principles of such institutions need to be based on a variety of forms of self-organization and collective ownership rights, which is exactly what Initiative 136 in Thessaloniki is attempting to achieve.

There are many other examples. The fishers of the Turkish port of Alanya manage their part of the global commons by allocating each fishing boat a clearly prescribed area of the Mediterranean according to the results of a lottery. They then rotate from area to area: from September to January, every day, each boat moves east to the next location. From February to May they move west. All fishers get the same opportunity as the fish stocks migrate. The system is collectively monitored and enforced. Problems are rare – and generally resolved in the local coffee house.

As Ostrom noted, “Alanya provides an example of a self-governed, common-property arrangement in which rules have been devised and modified by the participants themselves and also are monitored and enforced by them.” The co-operative self-management of a particular commons is likely to pay more attention to its long-term health and viability. The implications can be far-reaching:

“…the abiding logic of the commons is not based, as we have seen, on a balancing act between the roles of the state and the market, but on the idea of a polycentrism, decentralization and agreement between those touched by common problems. More co-operation, less competition. More conservation and the dynamics of resilience with regard to resources and their relationship with the environment than erosion, limitless exploitation and unstoppable appropriation,” writes Joan Subirats in Open Democracy.

New Horizontal Commons Democracy

Other commons-based movements, striving for an alternative ethos, are just getting started. Attempts to create a horizontal commons democracy include the Right to the City movement and other urban initiatives inspired by the French libertarian Marxist Henri Lefebvre. Right to the City has gained traction in South Africa with the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) shackdwellers’ movement, which is active in a number of cities across the country, and in the German city of Hamburg, where it has inspired a network of squatters, tenants and artists. It has become a rallying point also in U.S. cities such as Miami and Boston, and a source of inspiration in India, where Rajapalaya Lake in central Bangalore has been the focus of a fight to maintain a livable urban commons in very crowded conditions.

Some struggles combine resistance and vision. In Quebec, 2012 witnessed a remarkable movement of students against the commodification of education, which put the besieged notion of free higher education back on the public agenda. Their struggle, which helped to bring down a provincial government, could act as a template for those trying to recover the educational commons from the pressures of commercialization. In the 1990s there was a successful national fishers’ strike in India that prevented the government of the time from handing over the Indian fishery to big trawler operators. Countless other examples, big and small, dot the daily press but are often just restricted to obscure websites.

Commons battles tend to gain attention when they precipitate or are part of some larger struggle that involves active confrontation with those in power. This is, however, really just the tip of the iceberg. If you examine the specialist literature you will discover that almost everywhere there are attempts to make the self-management of the commons a reality. There is an International Journal of the Commons which acts as a forum for debate about commons issues and case studies of successes and failures. A quick look through the table of contents provides a sense of both the scope of the commons and of initiatives being taken to extend their democratic self-management. Here are but a few of the examples:

• The European Union Baltic fishery
• Irrigation systems in southeastern Spain
• A new marine commons off the Chilean coast
• The cockles fishery in coastal Ecuador
• Commons resource management in southern Namibia
• Participative action in Kafue Flats in Zambia
• An environmental response to the globalizing forestry industry
• Southeast Asia: rewarding the upland poor for saving the commons
• Self-governance of the global microbial commons
• Icelandic health records
• The commons and community development in the eastern Caribbean.

This list provides evidence that the commons is not some obscure issue but one that runs in one way or another through  the lives of most of the world’s people, often on a daily basis. The scope is truly impressive. It also has a lot of complex nuts and bolts to it with which we need to get to grips. But it is a complexity we need to embrace, eschewing simple-minded monocultural solutions in the process. This is an ongoing effort that will involve many.

The commons has the potential to become a new legal basis for the foundation of common rights to set against the threat of public-private partnerships. If this does not succeed, then we risk everything, not least our genetic make-up and that of the plants and animals with which we share the earth, being turned into corporate private property. The stakes are high. The commons are connected to our sense of place, to our identities, livelihoods and self-expression – ultimately even to our survival as a species. This is a good place to start envisioning a radical democratic alternative that gives people a fundamental say in their individual and collective futures. As such, recasting our relationship with the commons should take pride of place as we build an alternative to capitalism.

Richard Swift is an editor/journalist who worked for many years with the who worked the Oxford-based monthly New Internationalist. He has written a number of books, most recently SOS: Alternatives to Capitalism (New Internationalist Publications). He is currently a freelance journalist and last year produced a program for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ideas program on “The De-Growth Paradigm.”

Lead image: Jeremy Hunsinger under a CC license

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