The rise of so many right-wing nationalist movements around the world—Brexit, Donald Trump, the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, anti-immigrant protests throughout Europe—have their own distinctive origins and contexts, to be sure. But in the aggregate, they are evidence of the dwindling options for credible change that capitalist political cultures are willing to consider. This naturally provokes the question: Why are the more wholesome alternative visions so scarce and scarcely believable?

Political elites and their corporate brethren are running out of ideas for how to reconcile the deep contradictions of “democratic capitalism” as it now exists. Even social democrats and liberals, the traditional foes of free-market dogma, seem locked into an archaic worldview and set of political strategies that makes their advocacy sound tinny. Their familiar progress-narrative—that economic growth, augmented by government interventions and redistribution, can in fact work and make society more stable and fair—is no longer persuasive.

Below, I argue that the commons paradigm offers a refreshing and practical lens for re-imagining politics, governance and law. The commons, briefly put, is about self-organized social systems for managing shared wealth. Far from a “tragedy,” the commons as a system for mutualizing responsibilities and benefits is highly generative. It can be seen in the successful self-management of forests, farmland, and water, and in open source software communities, open-access scholarly journals, and “cosmo-local” design and manufacturing systems.

The 2008 financial crisis drew back the curtain on many consensus myths that have kept the neoliberal capitalist narrative afloat. It turns out that growth is not something that is widely or equitably shared. A rising tide does not raise all boats because the poor, working class, and even the middle class do not share much of the productivity gains, tax breaks, or equity appreciation that the wealthy enjoy. The intensifying concentration of wealth is creating a new global plutocracy, whose members are using their fortunes to dominate and corrupt democratic processes while insulating themselves from the ills afflicting everyone else. No wonder the market/state system and the idea of liberal democracy is experiencing a legitimacy crisis.

Given this general critique, I believe that the most urgent challenge of our times is to develop a new socio-political imaginary that goes beyond those now on offer from the left or right. We need to imagine new sorts of governance and provisioning arrangements that can transform, tame, or replace predatory markets and capitalism. Over the past 50 years, the regulatory state has failed to abate the relentless flood of anti-ecological, anti-consumer, anti-social “externalities” generated by capitalism, largely because the power of capital has eclipsed that of the nation-state and citizen sovereignty. Yet the traditional left continues to believe, mistakenly, that a warmed-over Keynesianism, wealth-redistribution, and social programs are politically achievable and likely to be effective.

The 2008 financial crisis drew back the curtain on many consensus myths that have kept the neoliberal capitalist narrative afloat.

Cultural critic Douglas Rushkoff has said, “I’ve given up on fixing the economy.  The economy is not broken.  It’s simply unjust.” In other words, the economy is working more or less as its capitalist overseers intend it to work. Citizens often despair because struggle for change within conventional democratic politics is often futile—and not just because democratic processes are corrupted.  State bureaucracies and even competitive markets are structurally incapable of addressing many problems. The limits of what The System can deliver—on climate change, inequality, infrastructure, democratic accountability—are on vivid display every day. As distrust in the state grows, a very pertinent question is where political sovereignty and legitimacy will migrate in the future.

The fundamental problem in developing a new vision, however, is that old ideological debates continue to dominate public discourse. Politics is endlessly rehashing many of the same disagreements, failing to recognize that deep structural change is needed. There is precious little room for new ideas and projects to incubate and grow. New visions must have space to breathe and evolve their own sovereign logic and ethics if they are to escape the dead end of meliorist reformism.

As I explained in a recent piece for The Nation magazine insurgent narratives and projects are actually quite plentiful. Movements focused on climate justice, co-operatives, transition towns, local food systems, alternative finance, digital currencies, peer production, open design and manufacturing, among others, are pioneering new post-capitalist models of peer governance and provisioning. While fragmented and diverse, these movements tend to emphasize common themes: production and consumption to meet household needs, not profit; bottom-up decision making; and stewardship of shared wealth for the long term. These values all lie at the heart of the commons.

For now, these movements tend to work on the cultural fringe, more or less ignored by the mainstream media and political parties. But that is precisely what has allowed them to evolve with integrity and substance. Only here, on the periphery, have these movements been able to escape the stodgy prejudices and self-serving institutional priorities of political parties, government agencies, the commercial media, philanthropy, academia, and the entrenched nonprofit-industrial complex.

Why is the public imagination for transformation change so stunted? In part because most established institutions are more focused on managing their brand reputations and organizational franchises. Taking risks and developing bold new initiatives and ideas are not what they generally do. Meanwhile, system-change movements are generally dismissed as too small-scale, trivial or apolitical to matter. They also fade into the shadows because they tend to rely on Internet-based networks to build new sorts of power, affordances (structural capacities for individual agency), and moral authority that mainstream players don’t understand or respect. Examples include the rise of the peasant farmers’ group La Via Campesina, transnational collaboration among indigenous peoples, platform co-operatives that foster sharing alternatives to Uber and Airbnb, and the System for Rice Intensification (a kind of open source agriculture developed by farmers themselves).

Rather than try to manage themselves as hierarchical organizations with proprietary franchises, reputations, and overhead to sustain, activists see themselves as part of social movements working as flexible players in open, fluid environments. Their network-driven activism enables them to more efficiently self-organize and coordinate activities, attract self-selected participants with talent, and implement fast cycles of creative iteration.

System-change movements tend to eschew the conventional policy and political process, and instead seek change through self-organized emergence. In ecological terms, they are using open digital networks to try to create “catchment areas,” a landscape in which numerous flows converge (water, vegetation, soil, organisms, etc.) to give rise to an interdependent, self-replenishing zone of lively energy. As two students of complexity theory and social movements, Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze write:

When separate, local efforts connect with each other as networks, then strengthen as communities of practice, suddenly and surprisingly a new system emerges at a greater level of scale. This system of influence possesses qualities and capacities that were unknown in the individuals. It isn’t that they were hidden; they simply don’t exist until the system emerges. They are properties of the system, not the individual, but once there, individuals possess them. And the system that emerges always possesses greater power and influence than is possible through planned, incremental change. Emergence is how life creates radical change and takes things to scale.

The old guard of electoral politics and standard economics has trouble comprehending the principle of emergence, let alone recognizing the need for innovative policy structures that could leverage and focus that dynamic power. It has consistently underestimated the bottom-up innovation enabled by open source software; the speed and reliability of Wikipedia-style coordination and knowledge-aggregation, and the power of social media in catalyzing viral self-organization such as the Occupy movement, the Indignados and Podemos in Spain, the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, and Syriza in Greece. Conventional schools of economics, politics and power do not comprehend the generative capacities of decentralized, self-organized networks. They apply obsolete categories of institutional control and political analysis, as if trying to understand the ramifications of automobiles through the language of “horseless carriages.”

Instead of clinging to the old left/right spectrum of political ideology—which reflects the centrality of “the market” and “the state” in organizing society—we need to entertain new narratives that allow us to imagine new drivers of governance, production and culture. In my personal work, I see the enormous potential of the commons as farmers and fisherpeople, urban citizens and Internet users, try to reclaim shared resources that have been seized to feed the capitalist machine—and to devise their own governance alternatives. In this, the commons is at once a paradigm, a discourse, a set of social practices, and an ethic.

Over the past five years or more, the commons has served as a kind of overarching meta-narrative for diverse movements to challenge the marketization and transactionalization of everything, the dispossession and privatization of resources, and the corruption of democracy. The commons has also provided a language and ethic for thinking and acting like a commoner—collaborative, socially minded, embedded in nature, concerned with stewardship and long-term, respectful of the pluriverse that makes up our planet.

If we are serious about effecting system change, we need to start by emancipating ourselves from some backward-looking concepts and vocabularies. We need to instigate new post-capitalist ways of talking about the provisioning models and peer governance now emerging. Influencing unfolding realities may be less about electing different leaders and policies than about learning how to change ourselves, orchestrate a new shared intentionality, and hoist up new narratives about the commons.

This essay first appeared in 21st Century Global Dynamics, Volume 10, Issue 62, September 21, 2017.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 International license

Notes

1 The Digger Archives: http://www.diggers.org/digger_dollar.htm
2 Garret Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science (Vol. 162, Issue 3859, 1968), pp. 1243-1248.
For one critique of Hardin’s model, see Ian Angus, “The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons”:
http://climateandcapitalism.com/2008/08/25/debunking-the-tragedy-of-the-…

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Over the next five years, farmers tested transplanting seedlings at twelve, ten, nine and eight days. They also planted only one seedling per hill; increased the spacing between hills; and even allowed soils to dry intermittently. This differed greatly from the conventional practice of planting thirty- to sixty-day-old seedlings at three to six seedlings per hill with close spacing, and with continuous flooding of soil throughout the season.

Results were encouraging. The plants became obviously healthier and stronger. The number of tillers per plant increased from 20 – 25 to 60 – 80, and yields increased proportionally. Yields increased from 1 metric ton per hectare (t/ha) to 2 – 5 t/ha, with a few plots reaching as much as 6 – 7 t/ha. Although results were consistent, Laulanié writes that by 1988 neither agricultural research institutes nor government extension services took the results seriously and were not even curious enough to visit the fields.

This did not stop the farmers from continuing to experiment with the new cultivation practices that they called the System for Rice Intensification, or SRI. In 1990, Laulanié and several of his close Malagasy friends established a local nongovernmental organization, Association Tefy Saina, to promote SRI and rural development in Madagascar.¹

In 1994, the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development (CIIFAD), based at Cornell University in New York, began working on agricultural improvement in the peripheral rainforest zone around Madagascar’s Ranomafana National Park. Introduced to SRI by Tefy Saina and surprised by the reported results, the Cornell team undertook its own tests. After obtaining consistently high yields for three years, they started to share the knowledge about this new methodology with rice researchers outside Madagascar.

Over the next twelve years, from 1998 to 2010, a small team at Cornell University shared information on SRI with newcomers and collected accounts of field experiences and reports from people testing SRI in their own countries. Knowledge was openly shared through lectures, seminars, personal visits, chance encounters while traveling, emails, publications and the small website that was set up at Cornell to collect and organize the incoming information. This website – sririce.org – has become today the world’s largest repository of information on SRI.

By providing a platform to share new ideas and results from the field, and to respond to questions, the Cornell University team found that an informal working network had developed on an international scale – a novel kind of commons. This was neither planned nor funded, as it had started out as a small unofficial side-project.

Similarly, in each country, unique initiatives and communities of practice developed independently. Thousands of individual farmers, curious about SRI, often in close collaboration with researchers and technical staff, tried SRI for themselves, recognized the benefits and shared information about it within their own networks. Witnessing the advantages, others joined in and developed their own national SRI networks that took steps to further spread and innovate SRI methods. Each network is somewhat unique, and has developed its own organizational structure and way of functioning.²

In time, given the ever-increasing demand for information about SRI, the Cornell team found the means to formally establish the “SRI International Network and Resources Center” (SRI-Rice) in 2010. Its original mission was to make available and advance knowledge about SRI and provide international networking support. But SRI-Rice soon expanded its role to directly consult on project planning, provide technical advice and develop guidelines and materials for training, data monitoring and reporting.

Since 1998, when Cornell started sharing information about SRI, many practitioners and researchers in Asia, Africa and Latin America have evaluated the SRI methodology. These wide-ranging efforts have confirmed that the SRI methodology is applicable under conditions in ecological zones ranging from humid to arid, and from lowlands to uplands. Today, improved crop productivity as a result of applying SRI principles has been confirmed in more than fifty countries.³

What Makes SRI So Different?

We have learned that successful introduction of SRI to a country depends mostly on: 1) leadership: motivated individuals bringing the SRI methodology to farmers and promoting positive results; 2) depth of technical knowledge and adaptation of the practices to a given environment, and 3) available funding, which has been mostly found from local, in-country resources.

There are other reasons for SRI’s surprising success:

The SRI methodology is easy to understand and easy to implement – although practices must be adjusted to local environments. As SRI is a knowledge-based methodology, once farmers become familiar with the SRI principles and most common practices, they can easily test SRI and adapt the system to their own environments. Practices are not prescribed; SRI is not a fixed package, and does not offer a “silver bullet” solution. Nevertheless, as farmers adjust their practices, the challenge becomes to capture what works well and share it with others. For this purpose, SRI-Rice has started to develop a simple and accessible Internet-based “citizen-science” platform where farmers and technicians can directly share their results and ideas with the rest of the world.

The impact is visible and clear. Applying SRI methodology increases yields by 20-50 percent and often more, while using less seed, less water and fewer or no chemical inputs. Farmers gain a direct benefit in only one season, and can do it with their available resources simply by changing their agricultural practices.

SRI’s surprising effectiveness provokes interest. Plants develop faster, are more vigorous and become more productive. Farmers, researchers, technicians are surprised the first time they witness the development of an SRI field! SRI arouses their curiosity and raises new questions about best agricultural practices. Soils, water, plants, soil biota and nutrients can be managed more productively. Farmers do not need to look for new seed varieties, fertilizers and other chemicals to improve productivity. They become motivated to think and experiment beyond previously perceived boundaries.

An example is the “System of Crop Intensification” (SCI), which has evolved when SRI farmers and field technicians adapted the SRI principles to other crops, such as wheat, finger millet, sugarcane, mustard, legumes and vegetables. This has benefited several hundred thousand farmers, especially in India.

SRI is open-source. It does not belong to anyone, but is shared as a commons. Nobody “owns” either SRI theory or practice. This can be unsettling to some, be they researchers or program developers, who like to think in terms of well-defined and predetermined theories and methodologies. At SRI-Rice, we work to make knowledge freely accessible to the public, as it should reach as many smallholder farmers as possible. The drawback is that the value of open-source knowledge is often not appreciated. Because it is freely available, it is sometimes perceived as being without value. However, this open availability has been instrumental to SRI’s success in many of the countries where SRI has been adopted.

SRI has had and still has doubters and skeptics. In the early 2000s, when SRI began to be tested for the first time in various countries, a short-lived but heated debate sprang up. Some rice scientists doubted that such substantial benefits could be obtained by changing agronomic practices alone. Who could believe that this simple methodology synthesized by an unknown Jesuit priest and refined by a global network of ordinary farmers would outperform the recommendations from the global research community?

Although SRI-Rice plays an important role for the SRI community of practice, the impact of its networking and advisory support over the past seventeen years is difficult to quantify. Outputs and outcomes are often indirect and nonlinear. Sometimes efforts show no results, and sometimes support is responsible for the success of a large program. The current estimate is that about ten million farmers benefit from the SRI methodology, although this might be underestimated, as it is difficult to know how the knowledge about SRI has spread.

The international community of practice is growing, but remains informal. Anyone interested in SRI can join the community. There is no membership and no selection criteria, but also no formal support. This has two implications. On the positive side: the community and the network, composed of several hundred genuinely dedicated and self-selected individuals, maintains itself; they remain part of the community even if there is little direct support. The downside is that many of the community members do not know of each other, thus large potentials for collaboration and creating synergies among partners are not tapped.

In response to that, SRI-Rice facilitates the formation of regional networks, so that technical exchange and learning can more easily happen across country borders, often based on similar ecological zones. We were instrumental in developing the “Improving and Scaling up SRI in West Africa” project, funded by the World Bank, where SRI partners from thirteen countries collaborate closely on SRI and where SRI-Rice provides technical support (www.sriwestafrica.org).

Nevertheless, it might be time to think about how to better structure or formalize the international network, creating opportunities for encounters and collaboration while keeping the spirit of the commons at its heart.

The Way Forward

There is a great potential to build on what has already been accomplished. There is a high demand for knowledge from smallholder farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the international community of practice is available to work with them. More than ever, we know how to best adapt the SRI methodology to various climates and cropping systems. .

About the Author

Erika Styger, PhD (United States), is Director of Programs, SRI-Rice, Cornell University, Ithaca New York ([email protected]), which she set up and has headed since 2010. Prior to joining Cornell, Styger worked for more than twenty years on agricultural research and development programs in Africa, including three years introducing and developing use of SRI with farmers in Mali.

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 mdid

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