I have argued elsewhere that degrowth is entering into the parliaments. Some political parties have started to adopt degrowth oriented or degrowth compatible proposals in their political programmes.

With two large conferences to be celebrated this year in Malmö and Mexico City, Federico Demaria, writing for the Ecologist, charts the evolution of the Degrowth movement over the last ten years.

Federico Demaria: This year we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first international degrowth conference in Paris. This event introduced the originally French activist slogan décroissance into the English-speaking world and international academia as degrowth.

I want to take stock of the last decade in terms of conferences, publications, training and more recently policy making. I focus only on the academic achievements in English, leaving aside both activism and intellectual debates in other languages – these are huge, especially in French, Spanish, Italian and German.

This is not because I think it is more important, but simply because it is the process in which I have been personally involved.

International conferences 

The academic collective Research & Degrowth (R&D) aims at the facilitation of networking and the flow of ideas between various actors working on degrowth, especially in academia.

For this reason – as well as in order to increase the visibility of the degrowth ideas and proposals in the public space – R&D has organized the 1st (Paris 2008) and 2nd (Barcelona 2010) conferences, and called with a Support Group for the 3rd (Venice and Montreal 2012), 4th (Leipzig 2014) and 5th (Budapest) ones.

Apart from demonstrating the latest research in the field, the conferences aim at promoting cooperative research and work in the formulation and development of research and political proposals. In keeping with this spirit, in 2018 there will be three international conferences:

1) 6th International Degrowth Conference: ‘Dialogues in turbulent times’ in Malmö (Sweden) on 21-25 August;

2) The First North-South Conference on Degrowth: ‘Decolonizing the social imaginary’ in Mexico City (Mexico) on 4-6 September;

3) Degrowth in the EU Parliament: Post-growth conference to challenge the economic thinking of EU institutions with influent EU policy-makers in the European parliament of Brussels (Belgium) on 18-19 September.

Many other conferences and workshops have taken place. For instance, the conferences of the European Society for Ecological Economics (ESEE) – Istanbul 2011, Lille 2013, Leeds 2015 and Budapest 2017 – have been important to advance the debate and the society has endorsed the degrowth conferences since Paris 2008.

Academic publications

In 2008 there were only a couple of published papers in English on degrowth (Latouche, 2004 and Fournier, 2008). I have lost count, but today there are probably over 200 published papers – for a review see Weiss and Cattaneo, 2017; and Kallis et al, 2018).

The Media Library at degrowth.info aims to collect them all. An article has also been just published in the new prestigious journal Nature Sustainability (O’Neill et al, 2018).

I think the eight special issues have played an important role in proving the legitimacy of the research questions raised by degrowth as an academic concept (Schneider et al. 2010; Cattaneo et al 2012; Saed 2012; Kallis et al. 2012; Sekulova et al 2013; Whitehead, 2013; Kosoy, 2013; Asara et al, 2015).

We might be assisting in the emergence of a new scientific paradigm, in the sense of “universally recognised scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of researchers” (Kuhn, 1962: x).

After this first wave of generalist special issues I expect a second wave: on specific themes (Technology and Degrowth by Kerschner et al 2015; Forthcoming: Tourism and Degrowth in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Environmental Justice and Degrowth in Ecological Economics, and a tentative one on Feminisms and Degrowth) or that introduce degrowth to a new discipline (e.g. Anthropology: Degrowth, Culture and Power by Gezon and Paulson, 2017; Geography: forthcoming Geographies of degrowth in Environment and Planning E).

The book Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era (Routledge, 2014) has been translated into ten languages. Others have been published (e.g. Bonaiuti, 2011; Kallis, 2017, 2018; Borowy and Schmelzer, 2017; Nelson and Schneider, 2018). More are coming, and we plan to launch soon a book series, most likely with a university publisher.

Training

The youth participating in the degrowth conferences presented a need for training opportunities. The summer school in Barcelona on degrowth and environmental justice has arrived to its seventh edition.

A more activism oriented one is regularly organised at climate camps in Germany. Degrowth is taught in many university courses, and in Barcelona we are about to launch a master degree in political ecology, degrowth and environmental justice, starting in October 2018.

Our Degrowth Reading Group in Barcelona has been running for 8 years, and many more exist around the world.

Policy making

I have argued elsewhere that degrowth is entering into the parliaments. Some political parties have started to adopt degrowth oriented or degrowth compatible proposals in their political programs.

In the House of Commons in London there is an ‘All-Party Parliamentary Group (AAPG) on limits to growth‘. Recently, a seminar was hosted at the European Commission titled “Well being beyond GDP growth?”.

The emerging field of ecological macroeconomics is shedding some light on policy related challenges (Victor, 2008; Rezai and Stagl, 2016; Jackson, 2017; Hardt and O’Neill, 2017).

Blank canvas

The future is a blank canvas. We need to think of aims, strategies and priorities. Let me mention two, one looking inward into the degrowth community, and the other reaching outward.

Inward, there is the survey for mapping degrowth groups worldwide. The resulting map will represent an attempt to bring together groups and individuals for political and practical actions on degrowth that builds upon the biennial conferences.

The map might evolve into a (loose) network that fosters the creation of synergies among individuals and organizations that situates degrowth as the common horizon. The degrowth blog already offers a space for these conversations.

A networking meeting will be held at Christiania (Copenhagen), one day before the Malmo conference.

Looking outward

Outward, one aspect is to strengthen the relationships with close research and activist communities like the ones of feminism, environmental justice, political ecology, ecological economics, post-extractivism, anti-racism, commons, decoloniality, post-development and economic and environmental history.

An interesting precedent is the project Degrowth in movement(s) that explores the relationships with over 30 different perspectives.  There is also the FaDA: Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance.

For the future, in Budapest Ashish Kothari (min 52.25) proposed a ‘Global Confluences of Alternatives’, along the lines of the Indian experience, Vikalp Sangam (Hindi for ‘Confluence of Alternatives’).

The start could be a joint visioning process. Fortunately, there are already great ongoing projects, like TransforMap to get motivated and learn from.

The ‘how’ and ‘why’

The ‘how’ needs to be thought through  – e.g. it could be a joint conference – but the ‘why’ is clear.

The alliances among these networks, and networks of networks, are fundamental to weave the alternatives and foster a deeply radical socio-ecological transformation.

We could imagine it as a rhizome of resistance and regeneration.

This Author

Federico Demaria is an ecological economist at the Environmental Science and Technology Institute, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He is the co-editor of Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era (Routledge, 2015), a book translated into ten languages, and of the forthcoming Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary. He is a founding member of Research & Degrowth. Currently, he coordinates the research project EnvJustice, funded by the European Research Council.

The post The rise – and future – of the degrowth movement appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The maps serve many purposes at once. They help amass new groups of commoners by giving them shared digital platforms. As the maps become dense with user-contributed information, they show the growth of horizontal, participatory power, especially in reclaiming rights to manage shared resources. These resources include everything from valuable urban spaces and lakes to fruit orchards accessible to anyone, environmental projects and hackerspaces. The many maps depicting commons and people-centered economic projects tell the story of communities rejecting the status quo, reconnecting with the places they inhabit, and creating a renaissance through new relationships.

Below, we describe some of the more notable projects that map commons. (A complete list of maps and weblinks is included below.)

A significant number of mapping projects focus on urban commons. Mapping The Commons(.net), founded in 2010, uses an open-workshop process to ask people to identify important common assets in their cities. Developed by principal investigator Pablo de Soto in conjunction with local research fellows, the Mapping the Commons workshop methodology has been used in Athens, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, São Paulo, Quito and Grande Vittoria. Workshop participants describe their relationship to each city’s commons and name the unique natural resources, cultural treasures, public spaces, digital commons and social actions that matter to them. Short videos are then produced and overlaid on an online map of the city. De Soto’s paper, “Mapping the Urban Commons: A Parametric & Audiovisual Method,” received the Elinor Ostrom award in 2013 in the category of “Conceptual Approaches on the Commons.”

Italians are forging some of the most innovative projects. World of Commons is a map that identifies forms of collective governance that constitute “best practices” for a variety of resources such as housing, public space, pastures, forests, and lands that have been treated as common property since medieval times. The project was created by LabGov, the LABoratory for the GOVernance of Commons in Rome, which itself is a collaboration between Labsus (Laboratory for Subsidiarity) and LUISS Guido Carli Department of Political Science. LabGov is attempting to develop experts on commons govern­ance and new institutional forms. To promote its ideas, LabGov offers a series of educational workshops in partnership with the cities of Rome, Bologna, Taranto, and the province of Mantua. The Bologna Lab has been particularly focused on developing new types of collaborative governance for urban commons. It has mounted a campaign to bring the principle of “horizontal subsidiarity” to Italian cities as a way to give citizens a constitutional right to participate directly in all levels of government.

Another mapping project in Italy is Mapping the Commons(.org) – unrelated to the Pablo de Soto venture of the same name. The mapping initiative was part of the initial unMonastery project launched in Matera in early 2014. The unMonastery is a social commune that is trying to help communities suffering from unemployment, empty buildings and a lack of social services.¹ The project engages skilled people and local citizens in a collaborative process to develop innovative solutions. Mapping the region’s cultural assets, local traditions, knowledge and stories are used to assist this process.

The Great Lakes Commons Map is unique in its focus on a bioregional ecosystem. The map was launched in May 2012 by Paul Baines, a teacher in Toronto, during a multicity educational tour organized by the Council of Canadians, an activist group that focuses on water as a commons. The Great Lakes Commons is a collaborative effort among many groups – including the Council of Canadians, On The Commons, indigenous peoples, municipalities, and urban and rural citizens – to create effective stewardship and governance of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Commons Map invites people to tell their own stories of personal experience and community healing and environmental harm at various locations around the lakes. The map includes lively videos and narratives as well as map layers that identify the locations of First Nations, pipelines and bottled water permits as well as supporters of the Great Lakes Commons Charter. The map is itself a commons in several respects: its stories and data come from people who love the Great Lakes, the map is shareable under a Creative Commons license, and the map platform is powered by Ushahidi, an open-source crisis mapping platform.

The P2PValue project maps a wide variety of digital projects created through Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP), which is a form of online social collaboration among large numbers of people in producing valuable information and physical products. P2PValue was created by a consortium of six academic partners to support the creation of public policies that benefit the commons.² P2PValue has identified over 300 CBPP projects from which it has identified best practices and favorable conditions for horizontal collaborative creations. Because digital commons as artifacts of cyberspace cannot be mapped geographically, P2PValue’s projects are listed in a searchable directory. The project is open to public contributions, and all project data and source code are freely available.

Some mapping projects focus on resources and organizational forms in the “new economy” and solidarity economy. Shareable and its global Sharing Cities Network have hosted dozens of “mapjams” in 2013 and 2014 to bring together urban commoners to compile notable sharing projects. The mapjams produced more than seventy urban maps that identify local coops, commons, public resources, and sharing-oriented platforms and organizations. Shareable cofounder Neal Gorenflo says, “Taking stock of your resources is frequently a precursor to action. Such maps indicate an intention, change the mindset of participants, and are a practical organizing tool.”

The focus of Vivir Bien’s mapping project is the solidarity economy and a variety of noncapitalist, not-for-profit initiatives and organizations. Founded in Vienna in 2010 by the Critical and Solidarity University (KriSU), the Vivir Bien mapping project has a European focus. The project website is Creative Commons licensed and utilizes OpenStreetMap.

The explosion of new mapping projects is itself creating new challenges that are currently being addressed. One of the most remarkable is surely TransforMap, which emerged in early 2014 from a collaboration of programmers and various people developing alternatives to the prevailing economic model in Germany and Austria. They concluded that all the maps being created need a common digital space. So they began working on an open taxonomy based on the criteria of human needs, which can be used globally. The global mapping process is guided by the motto: “There are many alternatives. We make them visible.” TransforMap is intended to make it just as easy for people to locate the closest place for sharing, exchanging, or giving things away in their own neighborhood as it is to find the nearest supermarket. Standardizing the datasets – a mid-term goal – will make it possible to amalgamate data from various existing maps into a single, open and free map, most of which will be made available on OpenStreetMap.

CommonsScope is a project of CommonSpark, a Texas-based nonprofit. CommonsScope features several collections of maps and visualizations about commons and common-pool resources. The website is a portal to several hundred commons-related maps including ones focused on food, community land trusts, social movements, public assets, indigenous cultures and sharing cities. Some of the more notable maps of specialized concerns include FallingFruit (a global map identifying 786,000 locations of forageable food), a map of Free Little Libraries (free books available in neighborhoods around the world), a global Hackerspace map, a global Seed Map, a map of all Transition communities, and several Community Land Trust directory maps. CommonsScope also features in-depth profiles for existing commons projects. The TransforMap initiative and the P2P Foundation also steward large collections of commons and new economy maps.

Thanks to many enterprising cartographers, a growing universe of commons and new economy maps is helping people see and reclaim all sorts of resources that have been systematically destroyed by colonial and capitalist cultures. The maps are also helping people create new forms of community self-governance and increase awareness of commons stewardship. Taken together, these maps tell the big story of this historic moment – how system-change originating from the grassroots is radically altering civilization from one that exalts private wealth to one where wealth is shared. The maps are far-seeing tools that empower us with the means to accelerate the emergence of a just and thriving world.

Ellen Friedman (USA) is project lead and founder at CommonSpark. Her work as an activist and professional counselor focuses on individual and collective wellness and liberation.

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 rvacapinta

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Maps shape our perception, they direct our transitions and they inform our decisions. Whoever doubts the power of mapping, might think of Google maps impact on the lives of the many. But not all, because there is an alternative: Open Street Map. The difference between the two becomes crystal clear when asking: Who owns the maps? Who owns the data? And who reaps the benefits?

Open Street Map is based on free software. It is owned and governed by you. It is constantly in the making, and open to all those who wish to contribute to it on the basis of the collective Open Street Map community criteria. Open Street Map is the topographic sister of Wikipedia.

When TransforMap was initiated, back in 2014, the community sought to combine the Open Street Map approach with the ambition of making the plethora of socio-economic alternatives – TAPAS: There Are Plenty of AlternativeS – visible. We wanted to add to the many crowdsourced maps a possibility to see TAPAs unfolding at a glance, all at once, on people’s devices, in a user-friendly way without being patronizing nor concentrating data. That was and still is TransforMap’s ambition: to challenge both the dictatorship of corporate-owned data and the cultural hegemony of a an economy stuck in a neoliberal or neoclassical Market-State framework through bringing plenty of Alternatives to everybody’s attention, among them the Commons.

Countless mapping projects around the world have similar ambitions. Just like TransforMap, they are committed to enhancing the visibility and impact of all those projects, initiatives and enterprises that contribute to a free, fair and sustainable future. However, most of them receive little attention in mainstream media and general culture, because they are:

•   utterly disconnected from each other
•   partly enclosed on proprietary platforms – like Google maps
•   built on different taxonomies, and
•   (luckily) highly diverse in their mapping approach

In short: not interoperable.

Working towards the interoperability of the countless alter-maps is widely perceived as a key element for enhancing their impact. Thus, the need for  convergence and for atlasing maps based on a ‘mapping as a Commons’‚ as opposed to ‘mapping the Commons’. The former is a mapping philosophy and crucial for distilling the governance principle of emancipatory mapping projects; the latter is just one out of many ‘objects’ or ‘items’ to be mapped.

The following lines roughly sketch out our understanding of ‘Mapping as a Commons’. Later on, they might turn into a manifesto for ‘Mapping as Commoning’‚ for many, many maps and through a multitude of mappers. They are written in an un-imperative manifesto form, to be used from now on as a guideline or quick analytical tool to evaluate the own mapping practices.

Mapping as a Commons: what does it mean? (0.2)

The following is based on the raw notes from Commons Space at WSF 2016 and an initial summary by @almereyda. The principles are the condensate of globally dispersed, locally found initiatives which collaborate for building and maintaining a shared mapping commons.

1. Stick to the Commons,  as a goal and a practice
The challenge is twofold: contribute to the Commons as a shared resource and do it through commoning. Your mapping project is not a deliverable, nor a service/product to compete on the map market. Hence, it is paramount to systematically separate commons and commerce and to integrate the insights (patterns?) of successful commoning practices into your mapping initiative. Strive for coherence at any moment!

2. Create syntony on the goal
Discuss your common goal and your understanding of “mapping as commoning” again and again. And again! Everybody involved should resonate in the essentials and feel in syntony with mapping for the Commons through commoning at any time.

3. People’s needs first
Maps provide orientation to common people but they also provide visibility of power and policy-driven agendas. Make sure your map doesn’t feed the power imbalances. People’s needs trump the desires of institutions, donors or clients.

4. Keep an eye on interoperability and use web technology
To map as a commoner implies caring for other mappers’ needs and concerns. You will take them into account through dialogue with partner-mappers and make sure interoperability is a shared goal.

5.Contribute to the Federated Commons
Mapping the World through Commoning is a double contribution: among commons projects and initiatives toward a Federated Commons and between Commons projects, solutions or initiatives and other socioeconomic alternatives.]

6. Provide open access
Always. To everything.

7. Use free software
Working with free software at all levels is critical, as it is not about the freedom of the software, but about your freedom to further develop your mapping projects according to your own needs.

8. Self-host your infrastructure
Only use technology which allows to be replicated quickly, and document transparently how you do it. Transparent documentation means understandable documentation.

9. Build on open technology standards
Ensure your map(s), data and associated mapping applications can be reused on a wide diversity of media and devices. Ergo: hands off proprietary technologies and their standards. Don’t consider them, not even as interim solution. If you do, you risk adding one interim to another and getting trapped into dependencies.

10. Make sure you really own your data
‘Mapping as a Commons’ strives for mapping sovereignty at all levels. In the short run, it seems to be a nightmare to refrain from importing data for geo-location or copying and pasting what you are not legally entitled to. In the long run, it is the only way to prevent being sued or having your data being enclosed. Make sure you really own your data. It prevents the real nightmare of at some point losing your data without being able to do something.

11. Use free open data licenses
To own your data is important, but not enough. Make sure nobody dumps your common data back into the world of marketization and enclosures. What is in the Commons must remain in the Commons. Free licences protect the result of your collective work at any moment. Make use of them. It’s simple.

12. Guarantee the openness of taxonomies
A taxonomy is incomplete as a matter of fact. It is one out of many entry points to complex social worlds. The more you learn about these worlds, the better you can adjust your taxonomy. An open taxonomy allows your peer mappers and users to search it for a concept, link them – via tags – to a parent category, to add missing concepts (if you allow), or to merge tag structures.

13. Make the Data Commons thrive through your usage
Link to WikiData and OpenStreetMap from the beginning! It’s just nonsense to maintain your single data set. There is so much to benefit from and contribute to the data commons. Explore abundance and contribute loads to our shared data.

14. Care for your Data Commons
Strive for accuracy and remember at the same time, that there is always subjectivity in data.

15. Protect the ‘maps & atlases commons’ legally as commons
Remember: each commons needs protection. Innovative legal forms help to prevent cooptation. Make sure the resulting maps and atlases own themselves instead of being owned by any specific person or organization.

16. Crowdsource your mapping
Do so whenever you can and for whatever is needed: money, time, knowledge, storage space, hardware, monitoring, etc.

Last resort

17. Remember always why you are making the map and who you are making it for. Remember that everyone is a mapmaker. Share what you can and if everything looks dark, take a break, keep calm and continue commoning.

18. Archive the map when it doesn’t work for you anymore. Others might want to build on it, sometime.

PLEASE HELP US  TESTING AND IMPROVING THESE PRINCIPLES.

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the Great Lakes Commons Map (a bioregional map of healing and harm), World of Commons (innovative forms of citizen-led governance of public property and services in Italy), Falling Fruit (a global map identifying 786,000 locations of forgeable food), a map of Free Little Libraries (free books available in neighborhoods around the world), a global Hackerspace map, a global Seed Map, a map of all Transition communities, and several Community Land Trustdirectory maps.

As the varieties of maps proliferate, there is growing concern that the mapping projects truly function as commons and be capable of sharing data and growing together. But meeting this challenge entails some knotty technical, social and legal issues.

A group of mappers met at the Commons Space sessions of the World Social Forum in Montreal last year to try to make progress on the challenge.  The dialogues continued at an “Intermapping” workshop in Florence, Italy, last month. After days of deep debate and collaboration, the mappers came up with a document that outlines twelve key principles for developing effective data and mapping commons. The Charter for Building a Data Commons for a Free, Fair and Sustainable Future is the fruit of those dialogues.

The Charter’s authors describe the document as “the maximum ‘commons denominator’ of mapping projects that aspire to share data for the common good.” If you follow these guidelines,” write the mappers, “you will contribute to a Global Data Commons. That is, you will govern your mapping community and manage data differently than people who centralize data control for profit.”

“The Charter does not describe the vision, scope or values of a specific mapping project.  It is rather an expression of Data Commons principles. It will help you reimagine how you protect the animating spirit of your mapping project and prevent your data from being co-opted or enclosed.”

Here is version 0.6 of the Charter, which is still a work-in-progress:

1. Reflect your ambition together.  Discuss the core of your project again and again. Everybody involved should always feel in resonance with the direction in which it’s heading.

2. Make your community thrive.  For the project to be successful, a reliable community is more important than anything else. Care for those who might support you when you need them most.

3. Separate commons and commerce.  Mapping for the commons is different from producing services or products to compete on the map-market. Make sure you don’t feed power-imbalances or profit-driven agendas and learn how to systematically separate commons from commerce.

4. Design for interoperability. Think of your map as a node in a network of many maps. Talk with other contributors to the Data Commons to find out if you can use the same data model, licence and approach to mapping.

5. Care for a living vocabulary. Vocabularies as entry points to complex social worlds are always incomplete. Learn from other mappers’ vocabularies. Make sure your vocabulary can be adjusted. Make it explicit and publish it openly, so that others can learn from it too.

6. Document transparently.  Sharing your working process, learnings and failures allow others to replicate, join and contribute. Don’t leave documentation for after. Do it often and make it understandable. Use technologies designed for open cooperation.

7. Crowdsource what you can. Sustain your project whenever possible with money, time, knowledge, storing space, hardware or monitoring from your community or public support. Stay independent!

8. Use FLOSS tools. It gives you the freedom to further develop your own project and software according to your needs. And it enables you to contribute to the development of these tools.

9. Build upon the open web platform. Open web standards ensure your map, its data and associated applications cannot be enclosed and are prepared for later remixing and integration with other sources.

10. Own your data. In the short run, it seems to be a nightmare to refrain from importing or copying what you are not legally entitled to. In the long run, it is the only way to prevent you from being sued or your data being enclosed. Ban Google.

11. Protect your data. To own your data is important, but not enough. Make sure nobody dumps your data back into the world of marketization and enclosures. Use appropriate licenses to protect your collective work!

12. Archive your project. When it doesn’t work anymore for you, others still might want to build on it in the future.

(Earlier versions of the document can be found here and here. If you have comments or new points to add to the Charter, here is a hackpad for new contributions.)

These twelve principles represent a lot of hard-won wisdom into the functioning of data commons!

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