Mattei is the noted international law scholar, lawyer and activist who has been at the center of some of the most significant commons initiatives in Italy. His chapter is a welcome synthesis of how the commons discourse in Italy arose from the misty-eyed imagination of a few far-sighted legal commoners, to become a rally cry in critical fights against the privatization of water, the Teatro Valley theater in Rome, and other cherished shared wealth. The concept of the commons has since gone mainstream in Italian political culture, animating new initiatives and providing an indispensable vocabulary for fighting neoliberal capitalist policies.

Ugo’s piece is called “Institutionalizing the Commons: An Italian Primer.” (PDF file) In it, he describes the history of the commons in Italy as “a unique experiment in transforming indignation into new institutions of the commons,” adding, “perhaps this praxis ‘Italian style’ could become an example for a global strategy.”

The story starts in 2005 with a scholarly project at the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, which examined the many ways in which public authorities were routinely privatizing public resources, often with no compensation or benefit to the public. This project later led to a national commission headed by Stefano Rodotà, a noted law scholar and politician. In April 2008, the Rodotà Commission delivered a bill to the Italian minister of justice containing, as Mattei puts it, “the first legal definitions of the commons to appear in an official document” in Italy.

The Rodotà Commission defined the commons (in Italian beni comuni) by dividing assets into three categories – commons, public properties, and private properties. Resources in commons were defined as

such goods whose utility is functional to the pursuit of fundamental rights and free development of the person. Commons must be upheld and safeguarded by law also for the benefit of future generations. The legal title to the commons can be held by private individuals, legal persons or by public entities. No matter their title, their collective fruition must be safeguarded, within the limits of and according to the process of law.

Specific common assets mentioned included “rivers, torrents and their springs; lakes and other waterways; the air; parks defined as such by law; forests and woodlands; high altitude mountain ranges, glaciers and snowlines beaches and stretches of coastline declared natural reserves; the protected flora and fauna; protected archaeological, cultural and environmental properties; and other protected landscapes.

This early (modern) legal definition of the commons is rooted more in state law and its recognition of certain biophysical resources as public, than in the sanctity of self-organized, customary social practices and norms. The definition nonetheless has provided a valuable language for challenging privatization, most notably, the alarming proposal by the Italian Senate in 2010 to sell Italy’s entire Italian water management system.

This outrage led to the collecting of over 1.5 million signatures to secure a ballot referendum to let the public decide whether the state should be allowed to privatize the water commons. In June 2011, Italian proto-commoners prevailed by huge margins and helped make the commons – beni comuni – a keyword in Italian politics. As Mattei puts it, the commons provided “a unifying political grammar for different actions.”

Over the past eight years, the commons has continued to gain currency in Italian politics as the economic crises of capitalism have worsened. The language of enclosure showcased how government corruption, neoliberal trade and investment policies, and state subsidies and giveaways were destroying the common wealth.This was underscored by parallel protests by the Indignados in Spain, the Occupy movement, and the Arab Spring protests, which also focused on inequality and enclosures of the commons. Mattei’s short book Beni comuni: Un Manifesto helped bring these themes to further prominence and connecting many single-issue struggles that had long been seen as separate, but which in fact share common goals, adversaries, and values.

I like to think that most towns, cities and regions of the world could and should begin to write their own modern-day histories of their distinctive commons. It’s imperative that we recover and learn these histories if we are going to learn from the terrible disruptions and struggles of the past, and invent new forms of social practice, culture and politics.

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By Jose Luis Vivero-Pol (Editor), Tomaso Ferrando (Editor), Olivier De Schutter (Editor), Ugo Mattei (Editor)

From the scientific and industrial revolution to the present day, food – an essential element of life – has been progressively transformed into a private, transnational, mono-dimensional commodity of mass consumption for a global market. But over the last decade there has been an increased recognition that this can be challenged and reconceptualized if food is regarded and enacted as a commons.

This Handbook provides the first comprehensive review and synthesis of knowledge and new thinking on how food and food systems can be thought, interpreted and practiced around the old/new paradigms of commons and commoning. The overall aim is to investigate the multiple constraints that occur within and sustain the dominant food and nutrition regime and to explore how it can change when different elements of the current food systems are explored and re-imagined from a commons perspective. Chapters do not define the notion of commons but engage with different schools of thought:

• the economic approach, based on rivalry and excludability;
• the political approach, recognizing the plurality of social constructions and incorporating epistemologies from the South;
• the legal approach that describes three types of proprietary regimes (private, public and collective) and different layers of entitlement (bundles of rights); and
• the radical-activist approach that considers the commons as the most subversive, coherent and history-rooted alternative to the dominant neoliberal narrative.

These schools have different and rather diverging epistemologies, vocabularies, ideological stances and policy proposals to deal with the construction of food systems, their governance, the distributive implications and the socio-ecological impact on Nature and Society.

The book sparks the debate on food as a commons between and within disciplines, with particular attention to spaces of resistance (food sovereignty, de-growth, open knowledge, transition town, occupations, bottom-up social innovations) and organizational scales (local food, national policies, South–South collaborations, international governance and multi-national agreements). Overall, it shows the consequences of a shift to the alternative paradigm of food as a commons in terms of food, the planet and living beings.

Reviews

“If you want to understand why the commons isn’t tragic, what gastronomy has to do with a democracy or what the practice and theory of a future food system might look like, this wonderful collection of essays is well worth reading.” — Raj Patel, food scholar, communicator and author of Stuffed and Starved, 2013 and A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, 2018

“The adoption of a holistic and complex vision of gastronomy is the only way to restore the true value of food. It is not only about production and consumption, but also wisdom, memory, knowledge and spirituality, traditional practices and modern technologies combined in an ecological interconnection between people and the planet. This book starts a needed and welcome reflection on the change in paradigm, and traces a possible pathway towards food sovereignty.” — Carlo Petrini, founder and president of the international Slow Food movement and the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Italy

“If we are really to transform the food system, we need bold ideas. Food as commons is one of them. If you are serious about exploring new ways of fixing the food system, read this book.” — Professor Corinna Hawkes, Director, Centre for Food Policy, City, University of London, UK and Co-Chair of the Independent Expert Group of the Global Nutrition Report

“Finally, a rich and rigorous assessment of food as a commons! This landmark collection of essays reveals how much we need to rethink the very language and frameworks by which we understand food and agriculture. The food we eat is not a mere commodity, it is the cherished, complicated outcome of culture, history, vernacular practice, ecological relationships, and identity. Insights on these themes can help us build new food systems that are stable, fair, and enlivening.” — David Bollier, scholar and activist on the commons, author of Think Like a Commoner, 2014 and co-editor of The Wealth of the Commons, 2012

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: the food commons are coming

Jose Luis Vivero-Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier de Schutter and Ugo Mattei

PART I: REBRANDING FOOD AND ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES OF TRANSITION

2. The idea of food as a commons: multiple understandings for multiple dimensions of food

Jose Luis Vivero-Pol

3. The food system as a commons

Giacomo Pettenati, Alessia Toldo and Tomaso Ferrando

4. Growing a care-based commons food regime

Marina Chang

5. New roles for citizens, markets and the state towards an open-source agricultural revolution

Alex Pazaitis and Michel Bauwens

6. Food security as a global public good

Cristian Timmermann

PART II: EXPLORING THE MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS OF FOOD

7. Food, needs and commons

John O´Neill

8. Community-based commons and rights systems

George Kent

9. Food as cultural core: human milk, cultural commons and commodification

Penny Van Esterik

10. Food as a commodity

Noah Zerbe

PART III: FOOD-RELATED ELEMENTS CONSIDERED AS COMMONS

11. Traditional agricultural knowledge as a commons

Victoria Reyes-García, Petra Benyei and Laura Calvet-Mir

12. Scientific knowledge of food and agriculture in public institutions: movement from public to private goods

Molly D. Anderson

13. Western gastronomy, inherited commons and market logic: cooking up a crisis

Christian Barrère

14. Genetic resources for food and agriculture as commons

Christine Frison and Brendan Coolsaet

15. Water, food and climate commoning in South African cities: contradictions and prospects

Patrick Bond and Mary Galvin

PART IV: COMMONING FROM BELOW: CURRENT EXAMPLES OF COMMONS-BASED FOOD SYSTEMS

16. The ‘campesino a campesino’ agroecology movement in Cuba: food sovereignty and food as a commons

Peter M. Rosset and Valentín Val

17. The commoning of food governance in Canada: pathways towards a national food policy?

Hugo Martorell and Peter Andrée

18. Food surplus as charitable provision: obstacles to re-introducing food as a commons

Tara Kenny and Colin Sage

19. Community-building through food self-provisioning in Central and Eastern Europe: an analysis through the food commons framework

Bálint Balázs

PART V: DIALOGUE OF ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES OF TRANSITION

20. Can food as a commons advance food sovereignty?

Eric Holt-Giménezand Ilja van Lammeren

21. Land as a commons: examples from United Kingdom and Italy

Chris Maughan and Tomaso Ferrando

22. The centrality of food for social emancipation: civic food networks as real utopias projects

Maria Fonte and Ivan Cucco

23. Climate change, the food commons and human health

Cristina Tirado-von der Pahlen

24. Food as commons: towards a new relationship between the public, the civic and the private

Olivier de Schutter, Ugo Mattei, Jose Luis Vivero-Pol and Tomaso Ferrando,

Text sourced from Routledge.com

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This post is part of our series of articles on the Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 14 “Finding Common Ground”:

GEJ: What would your definition of the commons be?

Ugo Mattei: The concept of the commons cannot be defined in straight terms; I simply use the following definition: commons are resources managed in the interest of future generations.

Molly Scott Cato: I agree; it is the use that defines whether a resource is commons or not. Let’s take for example the provision of livelihood: you can use your resources to secure the basic necessities, such as food, water, shelter, and clothing in many different ways; if you approach it in a form of ‘enclosure for exchange’ that means that you have done it in a market way, if you approach it in form of use for subsistence, then you have done it in a commons way.

What is the connection between the commons and ecology?

UM: The connection is pretty straightforward. We are used to living in a legal and socioeconomic system that is based on the extreme individualisation of society; an individualisation that favours technological transformations and capitalist extraction. The way in which this process has evolved throughout modernity is clearly not sustainable, as it assumes infinite resources on a finite planet. Any attempt to change direction, and to create new forms of social organisation requires us to create new intellectual categories. The idea of the commons has been certainly the most promising effort to overcome the capitalist mindset.

MSC: In the market model, resources are privately owned and scarce, while a commons model adopts a framing in which resources are abundant and shared socially. The reason we want to shift from the market model is that once you enable the enclosure of resources and their transformation into saleable units of goods and services, and once you create an incentive to exploit them more, serious ecological problems will follow. Whereas if you accept that the resources we all depend on are common property, and that we have a social incentive to cooperate in order to share them, we will obviously manage them in a more sustainable way.

UM: We are challenging the assumption that value corresponds to exchange and capitalist accumulations, and the alternative that we are looking for is a view that puts the ecological community and the sharing of resources at the centre, in a model in which satisfaction is derived from use, rather than exchange. This of course requires us to completely rethink the free trade agreements, for example, that are based on the opposite presumption, as well as many other capitalistic structures.

Are the commons that we find in nature different from those in the digital world?

MSC: Not really. As the examples of pollenating insects, wind, or sunshine show, almost every commons can be conceptualised as something that has a market value, and this works both ways: anything that you can make money out of, you can also conceptualise as a commons.

The classic example of the commons in the digital world is Wikipedia. Everybody uses Wikipedia, many of us write new Wikipedia articles, and we also often donate money to Wikipedia so that it can keep on working. It is a very good example of a platform that works because people are sharing. The opposite of the digital commons is something like Facebook, where we all put our photos online, but the platform is enclosed, and the money that is made goes to Mark Zuckerberg and his team. Imagine how much money Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales could have gotten if he had decided to privatise Wikipedia, but he deliberately didn’t do it.

If you accept that the resources we all depend on are common property, and that we have a social incentive to cooperate in order to share them.

~ Molly Scott Cato

UM: Pretending that there is an ontological difference between nature, science, technology, and politics in the current era is nothing more than an ideology. Due to the project of modernity, today we have an enormous amount of capital in the world, but almost no commons anymore. So the next project should be to transform some of this capital into commons. And clearly the information economy, such as the internet, is the first kind of capital that we can win back in the form of the commons. But this requires a huge transformation, because even Wikipedia, the only significant example of commons on the web, is dwarfed by Twitter or Facebook.

You said that with the commons we need to find an alternative to the market model. But don’t we also need an alternative to the state model?

MSC: I disagree with the three-way distinction of public, private, and social enterprise models. For me, we are all living in a world that is shaped by the market, and the fact that we provide some services through a public system doesn’t really take us away from this basic concept. So when I talk about the market model, I don’t just mean the private sector, I am talking about an economic model in which we are focused on exchange rather than production for subsistence, and the state is an accomplice.

Anything that you can make money out of, you can also conceptualise as a commons.

~ Molly Scott Cato

Is a commons regime an exclusive regime, or should it coexist with capitalism?

UM: If we started with a blank sheet I would say that the whole notion of the commons is a foundational notion, as foundational as the notion of individual rights for today’s capitalist economy. It is a completely different way to conceptualise law and social organisations – and in a utopian world, the commons could actually be seen as an alternative to today’s economic system.

There is, however, a more realistic perspective in which neither the public nor the private sector can yield to the commons easily. These sectors are very resilient. Since the Nobel-prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom started talking about the commons, things have gone in a completely different direction than we would have desired. There has been even more ‘technologisation’ and digitalisation, and the only way for the commons to prevail would be to live together with the capitalist organisation of things. In order to do so, commons have to be very smartly steered into some of the institutional settings that we have out there. We have to use what we have, in a way that exposes the contradiction of the capitalist economy, in the hope that it will fall at some point.

MSC: Here I think we have a bit of a disagreement, because the Green approach would be to say that you don’t wait for the collapse of the capitalist system, but you create commons-based alternatives wherever you have the chance to do so. That in itself provides us with a sense of learning and understanding, and a different consciousness around those economic activities that facilitate the transcendence of the capitalist system into something better. There are already some smaller examples, all over Europe. In Stroud, the town that I live in, we have set up a community-supported agriculture system that provides food for 200 contributing families; we pay rent for the land, but that is only a minimal rent. It is an example of a system that is based on a commons approach to provide vegetables to the community. It operates within a capitalist society, but it has a different understanding of how the economy should work.

The millennial kids are cyborgs, they think about themselves as individuals, rather than parts of a community, and are living their lives connected to these machines.

~ Ugo Mattei

UM: I don’t think there is a fundamental disagreement. We look at our possibilities, and try to construct a new form of consciousness which is necessary for a larger, revolutionary enterprise.

MSC: I agree, but instead of “revolutionary”, I would rather use the word “transformative”. And the internet could be a good terrain for this transformation, as today’s young people intrinsically understand how a commons economy might work. When they use and share digital goods, they are outraged by restrictions such as geoblocking (when access to content is restricted to users in some geographical areas). The internet also provides lots of opportunities to learn and conceptualise. Just look at Facebook: the value of Facebook is created by the users who contribute their content, there is only a very tiny amount of innovation involved in creating the algorithm and coming up with the initial idea. Nevertheless, this initial innovation was rewarded a million times over. I think we now need to make a claim that Facebook should be owned by the people who use it – like in the case of the Wikipedia model. I think it is outrageous that Zuckerberg can pretend to be a great philanthropist who solves the problems of the world, using money he enclosed from stuff I put on Facebook.

UM: It would be very important to look openly at the fact that Zuckerberg controls those large servers that store our data, and to figure out how to get back control over them. The governments are not going to do that for us, because they are in the pocket of corporations. So you have to use people power but that would require a level of consciousness and activity that the young people you are talking about don’t have.

The millennial kids are cyborgs, they think about themselves as individuals, rather than parts of a community, and are living their lives connected to these machines. It seems very unlikely that critical thoughts can come out of that generation. I think the wide use of smart phones and computers has a similar effect on people as heroin had in the 70s: it keeps complete control over generational aspirations, they are addicted to these things, and now they don’t talk, and don’t organise anymore. Don’t tell me the Arab Spring was something that proves this statement wrong, after five years we have a clear understanding of how little the Arab Spring has achieved.

Can the commons be useful for the European project? Can they be a driver for further integration?

MSC: The majority of European politicians are in support of an economic model that clearly isn’t working, while many citizens are losing confidence. Today, we can find two groups in the European Parliament who are advocating for a new economic model, but there is an important difference between the two of them: the GUE/NGL – Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left would see a bigger role for public ownership and social ownership, while we [the Greens/EFA Group] would advocate for commons, community ownership, and the social management of resources.

UM: I have been very perplexed about this for quite some time. One part of me wants to think that the EU is still worth saving, and believes that the commons could be used to gain some kind of constitutional balance. But it is not going to be easy. Today there is a very bad constitutional balance in liberal Western constitutional democracies. If tomorrow we wanted to socialise Facebook, we would have to go over many phases of social litigation, and the likelihood of losing would be extremely high. On the other hand, if any European government decided to privatise something they could do that without any form of control. If for example the Italian government is selling the post offices, there is no legal action possible for me to stop the process, even though it is my property as a taxpayer. An important role of the commons would therefore be to ensure that public assets are entitled at least to the same protection as private assets. This is why we need to advocate for a fundamental transformation in the constitutions of Europe, changes that would allow some kind of reconfiguration of the relationship between the people of Europe and their belongings.

A major worry for me concerning the EU is that I don’t know whether the commons are compatible with a system in which the centre of power  is so far away from where things actually happen; half a billion people in a single market, governed by the same laws and the same institutions seems too much to me. The commons are based on the philosophy of ‘small is beautiful’, whilst in contrast the European project is huge.

MSC: I disagree, I think that we need citizen participation at all levels: at the global level we need to solve climate issues, set common rules for corporations, and so on, then we can start with tax-policy at the European level, in order to stop corporations from making profits by avoiding taxes. Part of what we need to do is find out which powers should be exercised at which levels.

There is a liberal argument according to which most people only start caring about the environment once they become rich with the help of capitalism – and indeed we can see that Green parties are most successful in the richer Member States of the EU. How can we overcome this problem when advocating for the commons?

MSC: I think this is rubbish; if we look at where the environment has been destroyed less, those are the poorer countries of the world, and even the destruction that has happened there is due to the Anglo-Saxon and other European colonisers and post-colonisers. I think it is a complacent Eurocentric view to say that. But I take the point about our own societies; in Europe we haven’t been really successful in reaching out to working-class communities, but I think that’s mainly due to the way Greens speak and debate, and I think it is also patronising to say that that the poor are not concerned about the environment, because they absolutely are, and if they haven’t found a way to express that through politics that’s because the political system is failing them.

UM: This is a new, revamped form of the old, disproven trickle-down argument.1 I think claiming that only the rich care about the environment is completely unfounded. California, where the environmentally-friendly Tesla electric cars were invented, has an ecological footprint of six, which means if everybody else in the world were to live like the Californians, we would need six planets to reproduce the resources that we use. Burkina Faso, in contrast, has an environmental footprint of 0.1. These are the facts; all the rest is bullshit.

If the Greens are doing poorly in some countries that’s because of their poor leaders, at least in Italy, where the Greens existed as a small clique of people who had no capacity to talk to anyone who was different from them. But I admit that there is a problem due to the very strong relationship between the structure of representative democracy and the capitalist society, due to which a movement that doesn’t follow a capitalist mindset – someone who, for example, thinks in terms of the commons, rather than of the individual – will find it very difficult to be represented by the process of representative democracy. It is very difficult to impose commons from the top down, as the commons are a bottom-up platform, it has to come from the people, and the most conducive thing we can do now is to create some commons literacy, to talk to people, and to free them from the technological cage in which their heads are stuck.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 5th article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by Magalie L’Abbé

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Pollenzo, June 20, 2016 – was officially launched with the ceremonial signing of the FLF Manifesto by Mr Carlo Petrini (Founder of the Slow Food International Movement), and by Professor Ugo Mattei (Academic Coordinator of the International University College of Turin).

As underlined in the Manifesto, the Master will start in 2017, will be structured as a joint program between the International University College of Turin (IUC) and the University of Gastronomic Science of Pollenzo (UniSG), and will involve a limited number of highly selected students in 18 months of study, investigation and practice around the global food regime, its legal construction and the role of finance. The main aim of the FLF Master will be to challenge and critically engage with the perceived inevitability of contemporary food regimes, in particular helping students imagine a new model based on ecologically connecting all living beings and the planet.

Recognizing that nowhere the inequality of “global” society is more visible than in the polarisation of the contemporary food regime, the FLF Master of Research aspires to strengthen the legal and financial intellectual critique with the pro-active development of alternative styles of professional practice and active citizenship, strengthening students’ awareness of the deep-seated entanglement of legal reasoning and financial innovation, and providing them with knowledge and experience of the strategies of civil society organization and practices of legal resistance.

Open to students with different backgrounds and degrees, the Master will engage with (i) the material processes and competing paradigms of food production and consumption, (ii) the institutional design possibilities allowed by the legal imaginary, and (iii) the forms of economic organisation nurtured by different types of financial architecture, to account for and circulate value within society.

In the words of Petrini and Mattei “Our FLF Master of Research will welcome students engaged with these guiding questions: How do different varieties of (i) legal institutions, (ii) financial architecture, and (iii) material practices of the food systems combine? What transformations do they work on the social and natural ecologies of our planet? How can they be redefined and recombined in order to produce new realities based on equality, ecology and justice?”

Please find here further information on the joint postgraduate research program

Text of the Agreement

The agreement was signed by Carlo Petrini, Ugo Mattei, Nora McKeon and Olivier De Schutter

MASTER OF RESEARCH in FOOD, LAW AND FINANCE

Constructing innovative and ecological understandings of food regimes

The Master of Research in FOOD, LAW AND FINANCE (FLF) is an innovative joint program of the International University College of Turin (IUC) and the University of Gastronomic Science of Pollenzo (UniSG) which aims at fleshing out the complementarities and political crossovers between law and finance understood as material forces that shape not only the food regime, but the lives of social and natural communities on the planet.

Structured around 18-months of study, investigation and practice, the FLF Master will challenge and critically engage with the perceived inevitability of contemporary food regimes, while helping students re-think the inevitability of the current system and imagining a new model based on ecologically connecting all living beings and the planet. The main objects will be (i) the material processes and competing paradigms of food production and consumption, (ii) the institutional design possibilities allowed by the legal imaginary, and (iii) the forms of economic organisation nurtured by different types of financial architecture, to account for and circulate value within society. Therefore, the FLF Master is built on the conviction that it is only through an innovative triangulation of these areas (Food, Law, Finance) that the complexity of the material tensions and political trade-offs implicit in the global production regime can be properly brought into focus. We all believe that considering “law” or “finance” in isolation (as realms of practice one step removed from the metabolic processes that fold the life of human communities into the ecological dynamics of the planet) has itself contributed to a range of widening and unsustainable inequalities.

Nowhere is evidence of the inequality of “global” society more visible than in the polarisation of the contemporary food regime, torn between the unhealthily fed and the life-threateningly undernourished. That’s why the FLF Master of Research wants to shift beyond intellectual critique towards the pro-active development of alternative styles of professional practice and active citizenship, by strengthening its students’ awareness of the deep-seated entanglement of legal reasoning and financial innovation, and providing them with knowledge and experience of the strategies of civil society organization and practices of legal resistance. It is our conviction that this foundational dimension – an ecological dimension that keeps together the complex web of life – ought to shape any heterodox study and thinking of the food regimes, and has supported our research activity for the last years.

Our FLF Master of Research will welcome students engaged with these guiding questions: How do different varieties of (i) legal institutions, (ii) financial architecture, and (iii) material practices of the food systems combine? What transformations do they work on the social and natural ecologies of our planet? How can they be redefined and recombined in order to produce new realities based on equality, ecology and justice? We are glad to be actively involved in the FLF project since its inception, and we look forward to welcoming the first class of M.Res students in January 2017.

Photo by USDAgov

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Ugo Mattei, a well-known legal theorist of the commons, international law scholar and commons activist in Italy, is interviewed by the American Society of Comparative Law.

The post Video of the Day: Ugo Mattei on Law for the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

An important new book offering a vision of commons-based law has just arrived!  The Ecology of Law:  Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community, argues that we need to reconceptualize law itself and formally recognize commoning if we are going to address our many environmental problems.

The book is the work of two of the more venturesome minds in science and law – Fritjof Capra  and Ugo Mattei, respectively. Capra is a physicist and systems thinker who first gained international attention in 1975 with his book The Tao of Physics, which drew linkages between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. Mattei is a well-known legal theorist of the commons, international law scholar and commons activist in Italy who teaches at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and at the University of Turin. He is also deputy mayor of Ch­ieri in the northern region of Italy.

The Law of Ecology is an ambitious, big-picture account of the history of law as an artifact of the scientific, mechanical worldview – a legacy that we must transcend if we are to overcome many contemporary problems, particularly ecological disaster. The book argues that modernity as a template of thought is a serious root problem in today’s world.  Among other things, it privileges the individual as supreme agent despite the harm to the collective good and ecological stability. Modernity also sees the world as governed by simplistic, observable cause-and-effect, mechanical relationships, ignoring the more subtle dimensions of life such as subjectivity, caring and meaning.

As a corrective, Capra and Mattei propose a new body of commons-based institutions recognized by law (which itself will have a different character than conventional state law).

It’s quite a treat to watch two sophisticated dissenters outline their vision of a world based on commoning and protected by a new species of “ecolaw.” Capra and Mattei start their story by sketching important parallels between natural science and jurisprudence over the course of history. Both science and law, for example, reflect shared conceptualizations of humans and nature.  We still live in the cosmological world articulated by John Locke, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, all of whom saw the world as a rational, empirically knowable order governed by atomistic individuals and mechanical principles. This worldview continues to prevail in economics, social sciences, public policy and law.

The audacity of The Ecology of Law is its claim to explain the pathologies of modernity as they affect life today:  how this worldview prevents us from effectively addressing our many ecological catastrophes, and how jurisprudence as now conceived is a key element of this problem.  Modernity is based on the sanctity of private property and state sovereignty, write Capra and Mattei, an order that presumes to be an “objective,” natural representation of reality. Distinctions such as “private” and “public,” and “individual” and “collective,” are also presumed to be self-evident descriptions of reality.

For those of us involved with the commons, of course, we know that this is a highly reductionist and misleading way of understanding the world.  Commoning proposes more integrated categories for understanding how human beings function in the world.  In actual experience, individuals are nested within collectives, and they develop and flourish as individuals only in cooperating with others.  Similarly, subjective experience and objective fact are not isolated; they blur together.  The either/or divisions of modernity are a kind of consensual social fiction.

Law in modern societies is one of the most important tools for affirming (misleading) categories of thought.  For example, law presumes that if there is no external limit imposed on an individual citizen, each is free to act as a “rational actor” to extract as much from nature as he/she wishes.  This is presumed to improve upon nature, create value and advance human progress – a social DNA that has run amok and is destroying the planet.  In the worldview of modernity, individuals are imagined as the primary agents of change, and as isolated agents without history, social commitments or context.  This gives individuals permission to be as self-regarding and hedonistic as they wish, a dangerous capitalist-libertarian delusion that continues to hold deep sway.

Imagining a post-capitalist future, then, is not simply about passing a new law or instituting a new set of policies.  It requires that we confront our deep assumptions about worldview.  What we need, Capra and Mattei argue, is a major paradigm shift in the worldview of science and law that reflects a different understanding of nature and human beings.  We need to shift from a paradigm that sees the world as a machine, to a systemic, ecological paradigm that sees the world as a network of interdependencies.

We need to see that law is not something that exists independently “out there” as an objective reality.  It is a socially constructed order; a power that we must reclaim.  “Law is always a process of commoning,” Capra and Mattei write, reminding us that law emerges from communities of commoners.  This insight can help us build a new “ecolegal order” with three strategic objectives, they argue:  to disconnect law from power and violence (the nation-state); to make communities sovereign; and to make ownership generative.

It’s impossible to summarize all of the rich threads flowing through The Ecology of Law, so let me settle here for sharing a flavor of the argument made by the authors:

The most important structural solution to the rush toward final disorder is to restore some harmony between human laws and the laws of nature by giving law back to networks of communities. If the people were to understand the nature of law as an evolv­ing common, reflecting local conditions and fundamental needs, they would care about it. People would understand that the law is too important to remain in the hands of organized corporate interests.  We are the makers and users of the law.

An ecological understanding of law, the only revolution pos­sible through culture and genuine civic engagement, overcomes both hierarchy and competition as “correct” narratives of the le­gal order. It seeks to capture the complex relationships among the parts and the whole—between individual entitlements, duties, rights, power, and the law—by using the metaphor of the network and of the open community sharing a purpose.

Instead of being alienated from the law governing them, the participants in [commons] are their own law-givers and en­forcers; they stand outside of any power concentration and or any claim of monopoly over violence. They overcome the artificial dis­tinction between a private and a public sphere of their lives. Inter­pretation of law is here a nonprofessional exercise in the sharing of collective meaning. Law, when it is separated from depending on power and violence, is like language, culture, or the arts: it becomes a way through which a collectivity communicates and decides about itself.

The post Highly Recommended Book of the Day:: Capra & Mattei’s “The Ecology of Law” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

My thanks to Bernardo for his initiative and tenacity in doing the translation and in finding a suitable publisher, Stampa Alternativa. And my thanks also to the pioneering Italian commons thinker and activist Ugo Mattei for writing the preface.

Italy is at the vanguard of many commons innovations these days.  One sign of this is the first International Festival of the Commons (organized by Mattei), which will be held in Chieri, Italy, from July 9 to 12. I plan to attend, so perhaps I will see you there.

For the record, the Italian edition of Think Like a Commoner is the third translation, following the Polish and French translations. Translations into Spanish, Korean and Chinese are now pending.

Originally published in bollier.org

The post Just Published: The Italian Edition of “Think Like a Commoner” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It’s time for the international community of commoners to take a public stand against this very real threat. The mayor has summoned Italian law scholar Ugo Mattei to meet with him on Monday to negotiate a resolution. In advance of that meeting, Mattei and Salvatore Settis, President of the Advisory Board of the Louvre Museum in Paris, have prepared an international petition calling on the mayor to back away from his proposal and to allow this historic experiment in commoning to continue.

Below is a copy of the petition.  You can express your support by sending you name and affiliation to Ugo Mattei at matteiu /at/ uchastings.edu.

A number of human rights scholars around the world are keenly interested in Teatro Valle.  Noted human rights scholar Anna Grear alerted the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and Environment that “the attempted denial of popular ‘ownership’ of ‘place’ is fundamental to the cultural and material enclosures enacted by privatising and controlling agendas.”  She added that “closing down an important, even iconic, example of a fundamentally vernacular, community-based engagement with place (a vibrant, evocative commons) is entirely consistent with the deeper logic visible in moves such as the attempt to control the world seed supplies and breeds, to extend the corporatisation of the social spheres, to privatise urban space in ways that shut ordinary human beings out of them in central and important respects.”

For more on the backstory of Teatro Valle, here is a previous blog post on the occupation from February 2013.  Below is the petition now circulating.  Sign it!

The commons “Italian Style” must continue their experimentation! An International call to protect the Teatro Valle Foundation from Eviction.

Since June 14 2011, a community of artists and militants has transformed the Teatro Valle, the oldest and most prestigious in Rome, then at high risk of privatization, into the “Teatro Valle Occupato,” one of the most advanced experiments of merger between political struggle and performing arts in the current world. A trust-like legal entity, the “Fondazione Teatro Valle Bene Comune,” was created in the interest of future generations, with a membership of almost 6,000 people by a genuinely new process of cooperation between some well-known jurists and the Assembly of the occupants. While a notary has recognized the Foundation, the Prefect of Rome has denied its moral personality on the assumption that possession was not a sufficient title on the Valle premises.

Nevertheless, in three years the occupation, though formally never authorized, has succeeded in becoming a new institution of the commons, studied by scholars worldwide and the object of many publications. Because no authority in Rome has ever asked the occupants to leave and the municipality has paid the energy bill (roughly 90,000 Euros per year), it would be difficult to deny that the occupation was largely tolerated (even by the previous post-fascist major). Certainly the occupants have taken very good care of the ancient Theater, including paying for small renovations, and have  generated three years of exceptionally interesting shows, performances, meeting, educational programs that the population could attend on the basis of a donation system according to the possibilities of each one. The Valle experience has also inspired similar actions to protect theaters and public spaces through Italy; it is promoting a nation-wide experiment of codification of commons institutions involving some twenty of the leading academic lawyers in Italy; it has produced its own shows performed Europe-wide and has attracted to the Valle some of the best-known artists and intellectuals in Europe.

The European Cultural Foundation, among others has granted the prestigious Princess Margritt Award to the Teatro Valle and the ZKM of Karsrhue has devoted to that experience a stand in a recent major International exhibition on social movements worldwide.

After the European Elections last May, possibly as a consequence of an ill-conceived legalistic stance by the new Government, early negotiations to settle the dispute concerning the title to the Theater have been suddenly terminated as the Assessor of Rome responsible for culture in Rome has been removed and not replaced. As a reply to the Foundation request to resume negotiations, the new major of Rome, a member of the ruling Democratic Party and a well-known academic doctor, has released two days ago a statement asking the occupants to leave, threatening police intervention and proposing a public auction to privatize the management of the space.

This cannot happen! The city of Rome, as a cultural center of the world deserves a better solution to the Valle issue. We strongly plea the Italian political authorities to look for a method which facilitates rather than repressing institutional and cultural experiments to run the commons.

Ugo Mattei, Professor, The University of California, Hastings and Università di Torino.

Salvatore Settis, President of the Advisory Board of the Louvre Museum, Paris.

Please sign this international petition with affiliation.

Originally posted at bollier.org

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