Photo by Lynn Friedman

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The crisis of the European Union begs for new, unifying and constructive narratives – alternatives to the right-wing populist and nationalist wave getting fiercer every day. A commons approach holds the potential for a unified vision towards an alternative economy, a Europe from the bottom up and an ecological economy and way of life. The idea of jointly stewarding shared resources, community and a generative economy, can find resonance with a diverse range of citizens.

Sophie Bloemen and Nicole Leonard: A relentless focus on markets and growth has blinded us for the loss of social cohesion, rampant inequality and the destruction of the environment. In the perceived need to quantify everything, gross domestic product is used as a measure of social wealth. The commodification of our common resources and even our online behavior can seem limitless. Yet major fault lines are starting to appear in this dominant worldview based on individualism, private ownership and an extractive relationship with nature. A novel outlook based on networks, access and sustainability is emerging, where citizens are actively co creating their environment.

The Commons perspective captures the change in perception regarding needs and priorities. ‘Commons’ refer to shared resources and frameworks for social relationships that are managed by a community. ‘Commons’ also stand for a worldview and ethical perspective favouring stewardship, reciprocity and social and ecological sustainability. This outlook defines well-being and social wealth not just with narrow economic criteria like gross domestic product or companies’ success. Instead it looks to a richer, more qualitative set of criteria that are not easily measured – including moral legitimacy, social consensus and participation, equity, resilience and social cohesion.

Commons are not primarily a political theory but first and foremost a practice emerging from the bottom up. Everywhere people are engaged in alternative practices as part of the struggle for ecological, social and cultural transition within their communities. All over Europe local initiatives are taking care of their direct environment, sharing and stewarding knowledge online, and claiming natural resources as our commons. These include, for instance, community wifi structures providing internet access in remote areas, co-housing initiatives ensuring affordable housing, community land trusts that explore collective forms of property, or urban commons initiatives regenerating the city for its citizens. The digital knowledge commons are a key element of an alternative economy, and online commons projects have been able to attain an impressive scale. Creative commons licenses for cultural works, for example, are now over one billion. In all these areas, the commons approach offers a new vocabulary for collective action and social justice, as well as processes for communities to govern resources themselves.

The Commons to Overcome Political Struggles in Europe

So if commoning communities abound and cultural change is underway, what is stopping the commons from creating an alternative society? Perhaps commoners’ strengths – their localised, bottom-up stewardship of resources and strong community-oriented relationships – are also obstacles. How do we move from a loose network of atomised, emancipatory commoning initiatives to a strong network that can challenge the dominant, bankrupt worldview of individualism and economic growth at any cost?

Until now, European civil society, the NGOs and social justice networks, have not been able to unite around a broad shared agenda. Hundreds of organisations did unite in the fight against TTIP. However, in order to make progress towards another, fairer and ecological economy and society, a movement cannot be solely reactionary – it has to set the agenda and provide positive alternatives.

The emerging radical democratic initiatives that propose alternatives have mostly engaged at a national or local level. Examples are 15M in Spain, Nuit Debout in France or the University occupation in Amsterdam. The Occupy movement was trans-local, but did not succeed in genuinely opening up the conversation in Europe. Municipalism, such as in Barcelona is creating real change on the ground, providing an inspiration for cities not only in Europe but worldwide. Local struggles, forward-looking and emancipatory projects have to be connected in order to truly change the current order. The fact is that a great deal of the laws and developments that shape our societies come from the European level and global markets. There has to be trans-local and transnational solidarity around a shared vision of an alternative society.

The European Commons Assembly arrives to Madrid

The European Commons Assembly is an effort in providing a platform for these connections and trans-local solidarity. The European Commons Assembly that took place in Brussels in November 2016 has been a case in point for the unifying potential of the commons, and a symbol of maturity of the commons movement. A myriad of over 150 commoners, activists and social innovators from different corners of Europe came to Brussels for three days to develop new synergies, express solidarity and to discuss European politics as well as policy proposals. In the European Parliament, Members of Parliament exchanged views with this “Commons Assembly” and the political energy generated by bringing all these people together in this context was exceptional.

The ECA continues today as a political process and diverse platform, open to anyone who shares its values and wants to contribute. ECA explores what strategies to engage in order to nourish, protect, and extend the commons. How to develop the outward channels to affect political change, while taking care to maintain and strengthen its communities? How to build broader coalitions on the ground not bound to the left or the right, how to prevent erecting barriers with academic language and theory?

Since Brussels, the ECA has published a series of videos on commons topics, articles and generally aimed to visibilise the unifying potential of the commons narrative. Members also examined the intersections of the commons and Social Solidarity Economy and municipalist movements, with smaller assemblies held in Athens and Barcelona. Commoners from all over Europe and beyond are joining the online community all the time, and sharing their experiences, and even in the Netherlands and Finland commoners were inspired to create local commons assemblies.

ECA Madrid and the collaboration with Transeuropa 2017 provides the energy to move the process further along. It is becoming clear that the ECA needs to offer an added value beyond ideational affiliation. Assembly members will have to co-create the resources and practices that will strengthen the movement. That is why the idea of “production” figures so prominently in the discourse around this Assembly. The focus of the assembly this time will be on urban commons, taking advantage of ECAs presence in Madrid and Spain to examine strategies, failed and successful, to promote the commons politically and in public policy, including citizens in this process.

In Madrid working groups will focus on specific themes of the commons in the city, to create shareable outputs that bring these local experiences to a broader audience. This creation will nourish the toolbox of the ECA, in turn helping other efforts to support and scale commoning. This opportunity will allow initiatives to learn from and share with each other, attaining a level of technical depth and understanding that is necessary for change, deepening the European political agenda for the commons. At the same time, what is at stake goes beyond the specific themes and issues that color the commons movement.

The ECA aims to engage in conversations with other allies around Europe, and considers the political context and the commons movement as a political force that relates to conventional political power. Rather than letting citizen resentment of the current order and political backlash lead to Europe’s disintegration, the European Commons Assembly builds on these on-the ground experiences to draw hope and energy to power the commons vision and a renewed political force in Europe.

The European Commons Assembly will be in Madrid from the 25th until the 28th of October. The program includes participative workshops on urban commons topics, joint sessions with European Alternatives on the commons in policy, and opportunities to learn about and visit local commoning initiatives in Madrid. There will also be time dedicated to the future of the ECA.

Read and sign the Call: europeancommonsassembly.eu/sign-call/. Join the community: Introduce yourself by email at [email protected] Don’t miss any update! Join our telegram channel: http://t.me/transeuropa2017

Sophie Bloemen is a political activist based in Berlin and co-founder of the Commons Network

Nicole Leonard is the coordinator of the European Commons Assembly (ECA)

Originally published in the TransEuropa 2017 Journal.

Photo by cuellar

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The prevailing EU neoliberal economic and social policies have a familiar, retrograde focus: Increase market growth at all costs, deregulate and privatize while reducing government spending, social protections and services. This approach is failing miserably and highly unpopular, especially in France, Italy, Spain and Greece. But politicians cannot seem to escape this box, and even where leftist reformers win state power, as with Syriza in Greece, international capital (in the guise of neoliberal politicians) overwhelm them. Even state sovereignty is not enough!

So how might the commons help instigate a new political discussion?  The Commons Network report makes clear that the challenge is not about policy tweaks. A new worldview is needed. A holistic systems perspective is needed.

The report opens with a fitting quotation by , the great environmental scientist:

“Pretending that something doesn’t exist if it’s hard to quantify leads to faulty models. … Human beings have been endowed with the ability to count but also with the ability to assess quality. … No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point towards their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.”

Who is going to stand up for all the uncountable forces that make our lives liveable?  How can The System begin to take account of those things that can’t be tabulated on budget spreadsheets or aggregated into Gross Domestic Product?

Authors David Hammerstein and Sophie Bloemen write:

“The current crisis facing the European Union demands new, unifying and constructive narratives.  The commons is an emerging paradigm in Europe – one that embraces reciprocity, stewardship, social and ecological sustainability. It is also a movement, one that can reinvigorate progressive politics and contribute to a more socially and ecologically sustainable Europe.

“….The commons perspective stands in stark contrast to the policy priorities that currently dominate in Europe,” they add, citing “individualism, private ownership and zealous free market-thinking” and the “major fault lines [that] are starting to appear in that dominant worldview….At the moment, almost all EU economic policy is focused on the promotion of purely commercial actors and the uni-dimensional view of people having the exclusively individual aims of selling, owning or buying goods or services. The dominant paradigm is rarely evaluated by applying clear indicators of social and ecological well-being to judge the success of an economic endeavour.”

It remains to be seen whether politicians will want to explore and develop a commons framing or try to re-imagine politics. The right has generally seen more advantage in striking an angry, reactionary pose against immigrants and elites, while the left generally sees few alternatives than to try to humanize the neoliberal agenda using old-style bureaucratic systems and more government money.

However, there are some fascinating new attempts to develop a pan-European approach to democratic renewal, as seen in the DiEM 25 project and the European Commons Assembly, among other initiatives. The Commons Network report is an attempt to outline the logic, ethic and social practices of a new kinds of politics, with a focus on several promising policy areas such as participatory democracy, the urban environment and knowledge in the digital environment.

Hammerstein and Bloemen:

“Commons…stand for a worldview and ethical perspective favouring stewardship, reciprocity and social and ecological sustainability. This outlook defines wellbeing and social wealth not in terms of narrow economic criteria like GDP or companies’ success. Instead it looks to a richer, more qualitative set of criteria that are not easily measured – including moral legitimacy, social consensus and participation, equity, resilience, social cohesion and social justice.

“The commons discourse considers people as actors who are deeply embedded in social relationships, communities and local ecosystems, instead of conceiving of society as merely a collection of atomised individuals principally living as consumers or entrepreneurs. Human motivation is more diverse than maximising self-interest alone: we are social beings and human cooperation and reciprocity are at least as important in driving our actions.  This holistic perspective also tends to overcome dominant subject-object dualisms between, for example, man and nature, and to consider human activity as part of the larger biophysical world. Recognising the multiple domains of people’s lives, these bottom-up, decentralised and participatory approaches to our major social and environmental dilemmas provide functional solutions to the crises facing our continent.

“…..New social values and practices are enabling communities to be generative instead of extractive, outside of the market and state. This is creating a new civic and cultural ethic that is breaking with conventional notions of citizenship and participation. The regeneration activities of commoners showcase, above all, cultural manifestations of new ways of daily life. Community supported agriculture, cooperative housing initiatives that ensure reasonable and lasting low rents, local energy cooperatives, do it yourself (DIY) initiatives, decentralised internet infrastructures, the scientific commons, community-based art, music and theatre initiatives, and many other activities, all provoke practical on-the-ground cultural change.”

There is a cultural shift going on at the ground level, mostly outside the view of conventional electoral politics. But since politicians are averse to wading into new and unfamiliar lines of discussion – oh, the risks! – it is likely that the cultural rumblings will first burst out in the style of Occupy, the Indignados or the Arab Spring: an abrupt surprise. We may have to wait for a cultural paroxysm for political leaders to develop the courage to think big and be bold.

The sick thing is, Trump actually understood these deeper shifts. He just chose to exploit widespread resentments and frustrations in all sorts of manipulative, demagogic and self-serving ways. When will the pragmatic realists of the left and center begin to see the virtues of embracing the coming paradigm shift, and champion a humane social reconstruction?

Photo by fusion-of-horizons

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‘Supporting the Commons: Opportunities in the EU Policy Landscape’ is an appeal to the European Union to truly become an ally to commoners and commons-thinkers. With this paper, Commons Network lays out a clear unifying political vision for the future of Europe, a way for the EU to renew itself as a democratic and constructive force.

Commons Network co-director Sophie Bloemen: ‘A Europe by and for the people will have to be a Europe that protects and supports the commons. We hope this publication will help make European leaders aware of the urgency of this unmistakable fact, while also giving some pointers on how to go about it.’

The current crisis facing the European Union demands new, unifying and constructive narratives. The commons as way of thinking encapsulates these narratives in one fresh political framework. The ‘commons’ is an emerging paradigm in Europe-one that embraces reciprocity, stewardship, social and ecological sustainability. It is also a movement- one that can reinvigorate progressive politics and contribute to a more socially and ecologically sustainable Europe.

The commons perspective stands in stark contrast to the policy priorities that currently dominate in Europe. The European political scene is built around individualism, private ownership and zealous free market-thinking. Right now, major fault lines are starting to appear in that dominant worldview. Commons often emerge from the bottom up; they are dependent on community processes, and their logic is mostly at odds with the EU’s institutional logic.

‘We believe, however, that there is an important role for EU politics and policy to create the right incentives, to remove hurdles and to bring support to this re-emerging sector’, says David Hammerstein, Commons Network co-director.

So how do we as Europeans move forward? This policy paper reflects some of the EU policy barriers and opportunities in the areas of participatory democracy, the urban environment and knowledge in the digital environment.

Download the paper here (or the executive summary here).

Accompanying this paper, Commons Network will soon publish a strategy document & tool that will give an overview of the various policy processes’ timelines, key actors, and entry points.

What’s next for the commons movement? Commons Network is one of many organisations collaborating in the European Commons Assembly, which will reconvene in Madrid in October. Partnering with the Transeuropa Festival, commoners, activists, thinkers and politicians from all over Europe will gather in Madrid to continue building this movement. You are cordially invited to join us.

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I’m excited to announce that I’ve been elected to the DiEM25 Advisory Panel to help lead a new initiative with Renata Avila to craft DiEM25’s 7th pillar: a progressive tech policy for a democratic Europe. 

>Diem 25: The 7th pillar – a progressive tech policy that guarantees individual sovereignty and a healthy commons from ind.ie on Vimeo.

I’m joining the DiEM25 Advisory Panel to help lead a new initiative with Coordinating Collective member (and good friend and long-time ally) Renata Avila to craft the 7th pillar of DiEM25’s Progressive Agenda for Europe: An Internet of People.

Beyond surveillance capitalism

Today, we see a Europe in the throes of wholesale capitulation to the digital imperialism of Silicon Valley. We are worried to observe Europe’s growing dependence on the centralised, surveillance-based technologies of a handful of American platform monopolies that share an intimate relationship with the US government. This state of affairs doesn’t bode well for the individual sovereignty of Europe’s citizens or for the national sovereignty of Europe’s member states.

We also see, however, a unique potential in Europe – with its unique history, culture, and approach to human rights – to diverge from this current system of surveillance capitalism and mark its own progressive path ahead.

Progressive tech policy for a democratic Europe

The mission of our initiative is to start a Pan-European process, working together with members of the DiEM25 Network from across Europe, to draft a progressive tech policy for a democratic Europe.

DiEM 25: Next stop 2019? May 25-26, 2017 at the Volksbühne, Berlin

Our policy must achieve two important goals. First, in the short term, we must effectively regulate Silicon Valley’s abusive business model in Europe. Second, in the medium-to-long term, we must fund and create an ethical alternative to surveillance capitalism.

Imagine an Internet where everyone owns and controls their own space.

Our guiding principles in drafting the 7th pillar of the Progressive Agenda For Europe are the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Four Freedoms of the Free Software, the Ethical Design Manifesto, the “Share Alike” philosophy of Creative Commons, and a profound respect for – and a desire to protect and encourage – individual sovereignty and a healthy commons as prerequisites for democracy and progressive internationalism.

An Internet of People

In the words of Audre Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. A democratic Europe and a progressive internationalism cannot be achieved without democratic, progressive technological infrastructure.

We will take the first steps of drafting the 7th pillar in Berlin this Thursday.

The Internet of People imagines a decentralised, free and open, interoperable, sustainable, and democratic technology infrastructure for a democratic Europe and beyond. It is our progressive counter-narrative to the exploitative, centralised, and feudalistic mainstream narrative exported by Silicon Valley.

Imagine an Internet where everyone owns and controls their own space. Imagine a world where the ability to do this is acknowledged as a basic human right.

In such a world, all of your smart devices – the various technological extensions of your self – connect to your own sovereign node (and to each other) instead of to faceless corporations. That is the Internet of People. The Internet of People is an Internet that respects and protects your human rights and the integrity of your self. It is a basic prerequisite for personhood in the digital age.

It starts in Berlin on May 25th…

We will take the first steps of drafting the 7th pillar in Berlin this Thursday as DiEM25 meets to answer the important question: How can we take our European New Deal to the ballot box in every corner of Europe, and make it a reality?

Renata and I will be holding a 90-minute panel on the 25th to introduce the core philosophy and goals of the 7th pillar. During the first-half of our panel, we will be joined for short presentations by representatives from Free Software Foundation Europe and The Commons Network, Polina Malaja and Sophie Bloemen. The remainder of the panel will be an open round-table discussion with DiEM25 members. In the evening, Renata and I will take to the main stage to introduce the initiative alongside DiEM25 founders Yanis Varoufakis and Srećko Horvat.

Renata and I look forward to working together with the DiEM25 Network across Europe and beyond to craft a progressive, democratic, inspiring European vision to counter Silicon Valley’s neoliberal narrative of surveillance capitalism.

Here’s to an Internet of People, a democratic Europe, and to progressive internationalism.

About the author: Aral Balkan is an activist, designer, and developer. He’s ⅓ of Ind.ie, a tiny social enterprise working for social justice in the digital age.

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The Assembly was organized by Sophie Bloemen and David Hammerstein of the Berlin-based European Commons Network, in collaboration with other commons advocates and organizations. Two sets of Assembly meetings were held at the Zinneke collective, based in an old stamp factory in Brussels that the nonprofit collective had reclaimed.  Another meeting was held in the stately European Parliament building, hosted by supportive members of the European Parliament who sit on the Working Group on Common Goods, within the Intergroup on Common Goods and Public Services.

Bloemen and Hammerstein recently wrote about the meetings:

This movement of commoners has been growing across Europe over the last decade, but last week it came together for the first time in a transnational European constellation. The objectives of the meetings were multiple but the foremost goal was to connect and form a stable but informal transnational commons movement in Europe. The political energy generated by bringing all these people together in this context was tremendous.

Bloemen and Hammstein noted that the Assembly was comprised of “an explosively creative myriad of urban regenerators, knowledge sharers, energy cooperativists, community artists, food producers as well as disruptive social hackers of many different flavours.”  As a first-time organizing meeting, participants had many different agendas to advance, but they shared some basic goals – to “establish new synergies, to show solidarity, to reclaim Europe from the bottom-up and, overall, to start a visible commons movement with a European focus.”

Their account of the Assembly continues:

There was admittedly some culture shock: for some of the participants it was quite difficult and even contradictory to think and speak comfortably as commoners in the stiff, formal, hierarchical institutional setting of the European Parliament.  Nevertheless, in the parliamentary committee chamber packed with commoners and EU policy makers, with some of the MEPs even sitting the ground, the atmosphere was inviting. Leading commons thinkers and activists Yochai Benkler, Ugo Mattei and Janet Sanz sent their best wishes with brief video contributions.  Story-based example of commons initiatives such as community wifi infrastructuresand Barcelona urban commons initiatives were shared. The results of months of participative policy co-creation were presented and discussed: Proposals on community energy, participatory democracy, land governance and the natural commons. The MEPS in turn presented their proposal on the collaborative economy, which led to passionate discussion.

Work on these proposals and others will continue as will an organized exchange of views between supporting MEPs (members of the EP intergroup on commons goods & public services), and commoners wishing to have in-put into EU policy debates.

…..We started on the afternoon of the 15^th with a workshop on urban commons where local commoners shared their experiences with the Brussels Community Land Trust and the urban renaissance in the Josaphat neighborhood at the self-governed center Zinneke.  Dinner was followed by a joint discussion and exchange with DIEM 25.  The idea was to look for synergies with DIEM 25, the movement for a new social and more democratic Europe.

There was a frank discussion about the relationship between “the left” and local commons movements, between practical examples of building alternatives on the ground and macro political and economic visions of Europe.  People talked about content and philosophy, about politics, but also about whom we are addressing, and including or excluding in our narrative. We talked about building broader coalitions on the ground and not erecting walls with academic language and grandiose theories, of how to attract conservative commoners and how to confront or appease populists and xenophobes.

In the course of the meetings ad-hoc working groups were created to continue working on issues such as urban commons, financing of the commons and the future of the commons assembly. To complement ongoing online dialogues, different face-to-face meetings are now planned in 2017 and 2018, with offers to host them in London and Madrid.

Bloemen and Hammerstein report that the Assembly felt like “an explosion of energy. More then an Assembly, it felt like the birth of a political movement.”  You can see a three-and-a-half hour video of the Assembly held in the Parliament chamber here. You can also check out some short, lively videos introducing the European Commons Assembly.  For updates, you can join a mailing list by sending an email to commonswatch/at/lists.p2pfoundation.net.

Cross-posted from Bollier.org

Photo by GlasgowAmateur

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Commons Network, November 2016

Sophie Bloemen & David Hammerstein

With support from the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the European Cultural Foundation.

Supporting the Commons: Opportunities in the EU policy landscape

Major fault lines are starting to appear in the dominant worldview based on individualism, private ownership and an atomistic, rational society. Although science has moved away from this mechanistic, industrial age worldview to a more holistic outlook based on networks, relationships and systems, this paradigm shift has barely been acknowledged in politics, economy and law.[i] The predominant discourses that permeate political discussions in the EU are economic growth, competitiveness and efficiency – considerations that tend to trump everything else. The lion’s share of EU policy focuses on macro-economic indicators and the promotion of large commercial considerations. Citizens are often viewed in a uni-dimensional way – simply as entrepreneurs or consumers.

Commons perspective

The commons perspective stands in stark contrast to the policy priorities that currently dominate in Europe. ‘Commons’ refer to shared resources and frameworks for social relationships that are managed by a community. ‘Commons’ also stand for a worldview and ethical perspective favouring stewardship, reciprocity and social and ecological sustainability. This outlook defines well-being and social wealth not just with narrow economic criteria like gross domestic product or companies’ success. Instead it looks to a richer, more qualitative set of criteria that are not easily measured – including moral legitimacy, social consensus and participation, equity, resilience, social cohesion and social justice.[ii]

The commons discourse considers people as actors who are deeply embedded in social relationships, communities and local ecosystems, instead of regarding society as a collection of atomised individuals who are principally living as consumers or entrepreneurs. Human motivation is more divers than maximising material self-interest alone: we are social beings and human cooperation and reciprocity are at least as important in driving our actions.[iii] This more holistic perspective also tends to overcome dominant subject-object dualisms, between for example man and nature, and to consider human activity as one part of the larger living bio-physical world. Recognising the multiple domains of people’s lives, bottom-up, decentralised and participatory approaches to our major social and environmental dilemmas provide functional solutions to the current environmental and social crises facing our continent.

Cultural shift

Across Europe people are cooperating, co-creating and co-governing resources and goods on many different levels. Many local and larger networked initiatives are overcoming the dualism of commercial and non-commercial, public and private, individual and collective, producer and consumer to develop successful hybrid forms that place the common good before pure individual economic self-interest. The commons use voluntary social collaboration and co-creation on open networks creating social-environmental value in academic research, energy production, nature protection, health drug development and digital innovation. Across Europe, initiatives are springing up that prioritise either social cohesion, ecological sufficiency, community resilience or the sharing of knowledge – representing social and cultural shifts in value models. For example cooperative housing initiatives that ensure reasonable and lasting low rents, a local renewable energy cooperative, or an open access medical journals that back up articles with complete trial data. The regeneration activities of commoners showcase, above all, cultural manifestations of new ways of life.

What role for the EU?

The EU needs the commons and the commons need the EU. The EU project is in deep crisis and needs a roadmap towards more participatory democracy and a just and ecologically sustainable society. The commons can be, and should be, an important part of that roadmap – providing an alternative narrative, a positive and constructive discourse that is at once transnational and trans-local. The commons approach points to specific ways to reform the EU and its policies.

On the other hand, the commons also need to be nurtured, protected and supported by EU policies. Neo-liberal policies creating inequality, promoting unlimited fossil fuel driven material growth and the commodification of all our resources, are destroying our natural and social commons. However, these policies have also driven people to embrace self-managed initiatives in resistance to the overreaching power of the markets and capital in every aspect of their lives and the incapacity of the state to counter the injustices brought about by the financial crisis. Both tough austerity measures as well as discontent with individual consumerism have led to the pursuit of these alternatives.

This cultural shift towards community, collaborative practices, local ecosystems, sustainability, citizen participation and radical democracy manifests itself in many ways, Many local authorities in Europe such as Madrid, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Bologna are engaging with these trends. The EU needs to respond and acknowledge this shift, as well as framing technological developments and guiding developments through responsible institutions. Specifically, this also means earmarking much larger portions of EU funding programmes with criteria and indicators that give preference to commons-based economic, environmental, cultural and research activities.

If there is one investment that the EU should be making at this crucial time in our collective history, it is an investment in democracy. The EU’s democratic deficit has been plaguing the project for a long time; now it even threatens to contribute to the EU’s unravelling. The lack of transparent accountability of national policy-makers in relationship to the EU project is a major flaw; we need structural changes to increase this accountability. As well as improving the current channels of participatory democracy, such as the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), the European Parliament’s Petitions Committee and the consultation processes, the EU should proactively engage in the creation of instruments for participatory democracy for which technological development has created immense opportunities.

In order to support urban commons practices, and the engagement of citizens in the creation and governance of their direct environments, there needs to be conscious, tailored support for small initiatives and collaborative platforms that contribute to local ecosystems and a circular economy. A circular economy is restorative and regenerative by design, and entails zero waste generation through greater re-use, repair, recycling, sharing and closed –circuit industries. Todays ‘take, make  and dispose’ model is reaching its physical limits.

A rich and growing knowledge commons should be part of the EU roadmap, putting an end to the shrinking of the commons through further privatisation and monopolisation of internet infrastructures, (publicly funded) science and culture. We need public interest-copyright reform, true open science and internet infrastructures governed in the commons interest to favour a decentralised collaborative economy. The EU needs to prioritise and address the management of data in the collective interest.

Diverse movements of commoners are alive and kicking, but they need strong financial support, regulatory facilitation and political visibility. And they need it now. The EU can seize this pivotal moment and choose to become a leader in shaking off a chronic industrial age worldview by embracing the up and coming revolution of peer-to-peer collaboration, economic decentralisation and cultural sharing. 

Recommendations

We are calling on EU institutions to take a more holistic approach. We call on policy-makers to combine economic objectives with a broad integrated appreciation of collaborative, participatory principles as well as social, cultural and environmental objectives that draw on citizens’ priorities. 

Practicing Democracy

The European project sorely needs bottom-up innovation in order to address the limits of representative democracy and its current legitimacy problems. EU democracy needs an urgent dose of re-invigoration and innovative models of participatory political processes are one way to address this.

• The EU should devote time and resources to creative institutions of participatory democracy, learning from al innovative practices already taking place in many European cities.
• The European Citizens’ Initiative needs changes in order to become a useful, accessible tool for citizen participation with real possibilities for stimulating and influencing European legislative debates.
• The European Parliament’s Petitions Committee needs greater resources, more parliamentary power and more accountable responsiveness from the European Commission in order to effectively channel and debate hundreds of citizens’ petitions swiftly, effectively and in a transparent way.
• New digital technologies can facilitate and simplify the democratic participation of European citizens in the formulation, amendment and consideration of new EU legislation.

Commons in the city

Most Europeans live in cities and many of these cities are suffering from acute housing challenges, as well as environmental, multicultural integration and urban decay problems. How can we treat the city as a place that belongs to all its residents and that is governed and functions in accordance with their needs? In terms of policy opportunities for the urban commons at a EU level, there are several steps that should be taken as priority:

• Policies to enhance local control and public-civic partnerships.
• The Urban Agenda for the EU could be strengthened on a profound level by emphasising culture and civil society. Civil society should be allowed to play an active role in the partnerships in the Urban Agenda for the EU with culture as a cross-cutting issue in all partnerships.
• Commons as a Legal Category: The EU could acknowledge the commons as a way of organising and governing resources separate from public or private; it should even give guidance on law-making that takes the commons into account at the national or local level.
• The agenda for the collaborative economy should be translated into regulations that favour platforms with:
• respect for local ecosystems;
• community based and democratic online platforms.
• The action plan on the circular economy could be an opportunity if it is adapted to a localised/regional scale as opposed to its present globalised scope.
• Funding programmes should favour community based practices and civil-public partnerships.

Digital commons, knowledge and peer-to-peer collaboration

How can the EU respond to epochal shifts in technology, commerce and social practice and devise policies appropriate to the current age? How can knowledge be managed in a way that favours socially and ecologically sustainable stewardship?

Knowledge commons need flexible institutional and legal frameworks that allow self-organisation while also limiting unfair centralisation and appropriation of knowledge. Internet infrastructures need to favor democracy, openness and transparency going forward. Copyright regimes should be flexible – protecting the public domain and providing for exceptions and limitations to allow for the broad sharing and access in the realms of culture and science.

Internet and infrastructure

Maintaining an open democratic internet within the principles of net neutrality, interoperability, open standards, decentralisation and private data protection is key.

• Internet infrastructures should be managed in the public interest and, when possible, governed and/or owned by the public or community.
• We need investment in data infrastructures that allow individuals and communities to manage personal information in decentralised ways with the affirmative consent of users.

Digital Single Market (DSM)

• The follow up to the EU Agenda for the Collaborative Economy should acknowledge the problems with centralised platforms through regulation. This would include ensuring:
• a socially sustainable collaborative economy where workers’ rights are protected;
• the support of community based alternatives;
• the enhancement of data sovereignty.
• Spectrum legislation determining radio spectrum bandwidth for broadband digital service should have a significant amount of bandwidth that is legally earmarked for local, community based small-scale businesses or non-profit initiatives.
• To ensure the open internet, net neutrality should be upheld in a truly non-discriminatory way.

Further pro-commons initiatives that should be supported and expanded under DSM would include:

• the support and enablement of community Wifi;
• EU public-civic partnerships through crowdfunding;
• investments in open source software (FOSS Pilot).

Open Science and public goods

The EU has made huge progress over the last five years in embracing Open Science and Citizen science initiatives. Open science describes the on-going transition in the way research is performed, researchers collaborate and knowledge is shared. Citizen science is an open, participatory and inclusive approach for knowledge generation. However, there are still important steps to take in terms of intellectual property and data management.  Particularly:

• The EU Cloud initiative should ensure the use of data in the collective interest.
• The EU should explore and implement socially responsible and non-exclusive licensing conditions on its research funding programmes (e.g. Horizon 2020).
• Equally the EU should implement conditions on limited intellectual property rights for its innovation inducement Horizon Prizes, meant to create incentives for innovation through the granting of a monetary prize.
• In order to move towards an adequate incentive framework for a sustainable innovation system and to encourage knowledge sharing, the EU should explore the idea of open patents.

Culture goods, co-creation and copyright

In order to favour access to knowledge and culture and a dynamic knowledge economy, the upcoming copyright reform needs to favour the public domain, use and re-use and knowledge commons.

• The EU should recognise that, once a work is in the public domain (i.e. copyright and related rights in a work have expired), the works should stay in the public domain.
• In the copyright reform, the EU would need to expand exceptions and limitations to include:
• text and data mining;
• improved access to cultural materials for people with disabilities;
• non-commercial sharing;
• user-generated content; e-book lending and conservation by librarians;
• freedom of panorama; and
• the elimination of copyright for databases.
• Also in copyright reform: Ancillary copyright and neighbouring rights will add additional layers of rights hampering the free flow of knowledge and should not be further pursued.
• The EU’s stance in EU trade agreements and at World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) should focus more on the public interest instead of the expansion of rights and more enforcement of rights.

[i] Capra & Mattei, The Ecology of Law, 2016.

[ii] Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, 2007, MIT Press.

[iii] Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 2014, p. 112.

NB: This executive summary and recommendations are based on our full paper ‘Supporting the Commons: Opportunities in the EU policy landscape’, which will be published shortly. For the full paper and this summary we would like to acknowledge the inputs from Carolyn Whitten, David Bollier, Melanie du Long Rosnay, Dimitar Dimitrov, Ina Studenroth, Bruno Carballa, Marjolein Cremer, Tsveta Andreeva and Wouter van den Bos.

www.commonsnetwork.eu

Photos by p1ndar0

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One of the great advantages of a commons analysis is its ability to deconstruct the prevailing myths of “intellectual property” as a wholly private “product” – and then to reconstruct it as knowledge and culture that lives and breathes only in a social context, among real people.  This opens up a new conversation about if and how property rights in knowledge should be granted in the first place.  It also renders any ownership claims about knowledge under copyrights and patents far more complicated — and requires a fair consideration of how commons might actually be more productive substitutes or complements to traditional intellectual property rights.

After all, it is taxpayers who subsidize much of the R&D that goes into most new drugs, which are then claimed as proprietary and sold at exorbitant prices.  Musicians don’t create their songs out of thin air, but in a cultural context that first allows them to freely use inherited music and words from the public domain — which future musicians must also have access to. Science can only advance by being able to build on the findings of earlier generations.  And so on.

The great virtue of a new report recently released by the Berlin-based Commons Network is its application of a commons lens to a wide range of European policies dealing with health, the environment, science, culture, and the Internet.  “The EU and the Commons:  A Commons Approach to European Knowledge Policy,” by Sophie Bloemen and David Hammerstein, takes on the EU’s rigid and highly traditional policy defense of intellectual property rights.  Bloemen and Hammerstein are Coordinators of the Berlin-based Commons Network, which published the report along with the Heinrich Böll Foundation.  (I played a role in its editing.)  The 39-page report can be downloaded here — and an Executive Summary can be read here.

“The EU and the Commons” describes how treating many types of knowledge as commons could not only promote greater access to knowledge and social justice, it could help European economies become more competitive. If EU policymakers could begin to recognize the generative capacities of knowledge commons, drug prices could be reduced and climate-friendly “green technologies” could be shared with other countries. “Net neutrality” could assure that startups with new ideas would not be stifled by giant companies, but could emerge. And scientific journals, instead of being locked behind paywalls and high subscription fees, could be made accessible to anyone.

Bloemen and Hammerstein write that:

many of the economic and legal structures that govern knowledge and its modes of production – not to mention cultural mindsets – are exclusionary. They presume certain modes of corporate organization, market structures, government investment policies, intellectual property rights and social welfare metrics that are increasingly obsolete and socially undesirable. The European Union therefore faces an urgent challenge: How to manage knowledge in a way that is socially and ecologically sustainable? How can it candidly acknowledge epochal shifts in technology, commerce and social practice by devising policies appropriate to the current age?

EU policies generally focus on the narrow benefits of IRP-based innovation for individual companies and rely on archaic social wellbeing models and outdated models of human motivation. The EU has failed to explore the considerable public benefits that could be had through robust, open ecosystems of network-based collaboration. For example, the EU has paid little serious attention to the enormous innovative capacities of free, libre and open source software (FLOSS), digital peer production resulting in for example Wikipedia, open design and manufacturing, social networking platforms, and countless other network-based modes of knowledge creation, design and production.

Here’s a useful chart that summarizes key principles of the commons, policy designs, and outcomes that could be pursued through a knowledge commons agenda.

The report concludes with an agenda that the EU (or any government) could adopt to promote knowledge commons.  It includes such ideas as non-exclusive licensing of research so that biomedical innovations could have greater impact and more benefit for taxpayers; new support for knowledge commons through such things as patent pools, data sharing, the sharing of green technologies, and biomedical prizes that would make discoveries more widely available.  Muiltilateral trade treaties could be designed to promote investment in R&D and knowledge sharing among countries, producing enormous social benefits for people through expanding the global knowledge commons.  Net neutrality policies for the Internet could have similar catalytic benefits.

Will the EU stand in the way of the “collaborative economy” that is emerging, giving protectionist privileges to the big, politically connected digital corporations – or will it stand up for the great benefits that can be generated through open platforms, collaborative projects and knowledge sharing?  It’s great that this new report is stimulating this long-overdue debate.

For a broader overview of how the commons is going mainstream in Europe – most notably, via the new commons Intergroup in the European Parliament — here’s an insightful article by Dan Hancox that recently appeared in Al Jazeera English.

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The European Parliament is formally focusing on the commons paradigm through a new “Intergroup on common goods,” which is part of a larger group known as the “European Parliamentary Intergroup on Common Goods and Public Services.”  The group met for the first time on May 26 in Brussels, at the European Parliament.  At this early stage, it’s hard to tell if it will be influential either within the European Parliament or with the public, but it certainly represents a significant new threshold for commons activism.

Intergroups are official forums of the Parliament at which members, political organizations and movements can air their views and try to rally attention to a given topic. As Sophie Bloemen of the Commons Network writes:

Even though the intergroups have no legislative power, they can be valuable having such a representation in the European Parliament. At the minimum, it is a multiparty forum where one can exchange views and propose ideas on particular subjects in an informal way. Those who choose to work with such an intergroup, its Members of Parliament, and civil society or lobbyists, share the notion that a certain topic is important and can focus on how to get things done.

Now there will also be a Commons Intergroup. This particular group will allow for discussions on policy from a shared perspective: the idea that “the commons” – is an important and helpful way of framing the important themes of present times. As there can only be so many Intergroups, inevitably the group is the result of a political compromise. It has been formed by Members of the European Parliament from the Greens, the left group GUE, the large Social Democrat party (S&D) and the group EFDD which now includes Beppe Grillo with his Cinque Stelle party. The movement on water as a commons has been instrumental for the mobilization of the intergroup.

For political reasons, the Commons Intergroup is one of two subgroups of the European Parliamentary intergroup on Common Goods and Public Services. MEP Marisa Matias from GUE is the president of the Commons Intergroup.

Bloemen sees the very formation of the Intergroup as “confirmation of the aspirations and discourse of the commons becoming a political force.”  But she also wonders “how an intergroup with such a broad scope as commons or common goods [can] be useful? Aren’t the daily activities of the European Parliament in the end about concrete policies, amendments to policy proposals and votes?”

These were not the only questions about the new Intergroup.  Denis Postle, a Brit who blogs at psyCommons, wrote about his own misgivings about the meeting – and its promise:

There were repeated calls for “the need for debate” but debate was overwhelmingly subordinate to a series of charismatic and often vociferous presentations mostly from the podium, peppered with multiple exhortations that the commons and common goods “were a good idea,” “we must…” “we need…” “we have to…” etc., etc. Lots of talk about commons not much apparently fromcommons. When I spoke to ask the other delegates “who we were” and how many had direct experience of commoning, around a third of the audience put up their hands, an indicator perhaps that less preaching to the converted would have been appropriate.

This was an inaugural meeting, so uncertainty and clumsiness can be excused, however on balance the presentations had a lot to say about common goodsresources, i.e., a city’s water supply and much less about commoning, often a fragile flower growing out of peer-to-peer governance, commitment and emotional competence.

Was this a meeting then, as it perhaps seemed, where the old left was trying to befriend a new and promising flavour of the political month? There was no coffee break and apart from casual chat before the meeting, no interaction between the assembled delegates –the old paradigm of a representative polity?

And yet… in her introductory remarks Marisa Matias outlined two agenda items, “how to think outside the logic of the state” and “how to handle the management of the commons,” both radical contradictions of neoliberal preferences. Perhaps this Common Goods Intergroup event was a way of introducing to an old politics, news of political innovation that was proving unexpectedly and improbably successful.

The arrival of the Commons Integroup can’t help but provoke reflections on the rising tide of other commons initiatives in Europe.  There were the recent elections of leaders in Barcelona with an explicit commons agenda; the new public/commons partnerships instigated by the city governments of Bologna and other Italian cities; the festivals for the commons in Greece, Italy and elsewhere; the re-muncipalization of the Paris water supply; and the growing interest in the commons paradigm among French academics and graduate students, especially as the performance of the Socialist Party declines.

As a creature of the European Parliament, the Commons Intergroup may face some serious challenges in advancing a commons agenda, however. How will it deal with the multiple definitions of commons, the diversity of voices, and the wide-open agenda that could focus on dozens of suitable topics?  Still, it is significant that there was sufficient interest among credentialed European political factions to discuss the commons and give it a political presence That’s a huge advance.

So now there exists a forum in which to hash through conflicting views of the commons and to give visibility to a neglected realm of European public policy.  Let the debates begin over whether the commons is a resource alone or a social activity, what should be considered a commons, and how best to protect them from enclosure. Let us hear, too, of the many innovative policy initiatives that might support and protect commons.

An important conversation has begun!

originally published at Bollier.org

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