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.

The post A Short History of the Commons in Italy (2005-present) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Before 2010, Paris’s water service was provided by four entities:  two private companies, Suez and Veolia; SAGEP, a public/private company using public drinking water infrastructure, and a public laboratory in charge of water safety. This situation diluted responsibility and hiked the price of water for users. That is why the Paris municipality decided to fully remunicipalise and reintegrate water services, at the end of the current contracts EDP captures, produces and distributes 170 million cubic meters of drinking water a year for 3 million users.

EDP began operating Paris’s water systems in January 2010 with a fully integrated water management, from source to tap. From the first year, the structural savings of about 30 million euros per year made it possible to lower the price of water by 8%. Today, this price is still lower than it was before 2010. EDP also ensure a concrete right to water through free public fountains in public spaces, cooperation with associations supporting homeless people and refugees, and partnerships with social landlords.

EDP has adopted environmental management practices in all the natural spaces it manages and supports many farmers in setting up sustainable farming practices, that are useful for water quality.

“What EDP tells us is that a public company can be a pioneer in ecological transition, internal democracy (anti-discrimination, gender equality) for workers, with very high levels of transparency and accountability. This is not merely a case of remunicipalisation but an example of how a new generation of public companies can work.”

– Evaluator Satoko Kishimoto

Transformative Cities’ Atlas of Utopias is being serialized on the P2P Foundation Blog. Go to TransformativeCities.org for updates.

The post Paris, France: Eau de Paris delivers cheaper, cleaner water under remunicipalised utility appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Johannes Euler: In Cochabamba, Bolivia, the lack of water has caused conflicts for decades. In 1999, Cochabamba’s public water supplier, SEMAPA, was leased to the international consortium Aguas del Tunari. The major shareholder of the consortium was the multinational company Bechtel. In the course of the privatization procedures, independent water and irrigation systems and autonomous water services were threatened with expropriation. Water prices rose steeply as a result. In response, several civil society groups formed the “Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida” (Coalition for the Defense of Water and Life). Protests against these policies were fierce, lasted several months, and raised the issue to national and international levels.

Eventually, Aguas del Tunari was expelled. Control of SEMAPA was transferred to representatives from the municipality, the trade union, and the Coordinadora (though these arrangements have subsequently changed). The statutes of the hybrid company were rewritten in a challenging participatory process, but SEMAPA is still known for its lack of efficiency and transparency. Moverover, the state is currently trying to extend its sphere of control into the water sector. However, the so-called Cochabamba Water War contributed to major changes in Bolivia’s water sector, the respective laws, the establishment of a national Ministry of the Environment and Water, and of the country as a whole.

Key points of Bolivian policy reforms sparked by the Cochabamba Water War:

• In 2000, the pro-privatization Law 2029 was canceled and rewritten as Drinking Water and Sanitation Services Law (2066). It was the result of negotiations between social movements and the state during the water wars. It recognized marginalized communities’ rights to use water and differentiated them from capitalist activities, which had to be authorized and were subject to fees.
• In 2004, similar principles were applied to the irrigation sector (Law 2878), which recognized decentralized irrigation governance. Both laws support indigenous people and farm laborers from being dispossessed of water. At the same time, they contributed to the formalization of water management, which tends to favor commercial management over community management.
• The Bolivian constitution was changed in 2009. Prior to 2009, water supply concessions could be granted for up to 40 years. The new constitution considers water a basic right of life and bans the typical methods of privatization and leasing of water services to for-profit entities.

Sustainability and public participation are declared to be the responsibility of the state as well as universal access to water. To which extent these intentions will actually be reflected in reality remains to be seen, however. The responsibilities coming with this basic-rights approach demand action by the state and challenge community management at the same time.

Learn more from:

• Article on water laws in the Andes

Header image by kris krüg on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The post How a water war in Bolivia led to the reversal of privatization appeared first on P2P Foundation.

What’s To Catch the Rain all about?

To Catch the Rain is a book of inspiring stories of communities coming together to catch their own rain, with the nitty-gritty details so you can do it as well.

Community created rainwater projects from the US, Mexico, and Dominican Republic.

It is a book for people looking to build a better future together.

• Inspiring stories: Real life accounts of catching rain in communities.
• Technical details: Straightforward descriptions of rainwater system parts, replete with examples from existing systems (many from the systems described in the stories).
• Math and science: Easy-to-follow math that allows readers to simply size rainwater systems, including completed examples.

Example of the math showing how the average US home has over 33,000 gallons per year land on its roof.

Audience

This book is for everyone, and is especially written for:

• Community members: Get inspired and take action. Learn from others building their own systems around the world. We have already received requests and sent pre-releases to Kenya, Tanzania, India, Mexico, Nepal, Dominican Republic, and the US.
• Makers: Find the DIY details ready to be adapted to your local and global projects. See how other makers solved their problems.
• Teachers: Use this in your Middle School, High School, and University courses. Provides context for education and practical experience to back up math, science, and social curriculum. Includes problem-sets to reinforce the knowledge in the book.
• Students: Rejoice in strong practical reasons to be learning. The real stories bring the math and technical details to life. The custom diagrams and pictures deepen the learning.
• Practivistas: Expand the resilience and impact of the idea that, instead of telling people what not to do, we can build better systems that people want to do.
• People looking for inspiration and follow-through.

Rainwater catchment for gardens, edible landscaping, and emergency relief in California.

Where you come in

We need your help to bring this book to a reality. The writing of the book is done. Now we need money for design, layout, printing, distributing, and translating.  Which is why we are asking for your financial support to make it beautiful, more accessible, and less expensive!

The content has gone through multiple reviews, including academic peer reviews and by edits by friends, students, colleagues, and kind professionals. It is ready for the world!… once we raise the money and finish these last important components.

Click here to contribute to the crowdfund campaign

The post To Catch the Rain appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Great Lakes Commons is inviting people to give a Currency of Care note as a thank-you to people who have done something to protect the Great Lakes in big or small ways.  Or you can give notes to people as a request that they do something to protect the lakes in the future.  Paul Baines, an organizer of the project, notes:

“Each note represents the act of giving gratitude or requesting action. Each note carries the most precious value: acts of thanks and care for the Great Lakes. Rather than based on dollars, the value of these notes is our collective agreement and intention to reward people for their water protection through past actions (saying ‘thanks’) or future actions (saying ‘please’).  Because our current money systems only acknowledge economic utility and gain, our Great Lakes Commons currency needs a wildly different theory of value — such as past/future actions for water care.”

More than 5,000 individually numbered bills have been distributed, all of them due to expire at end of year.  Why the expiration date?  Because “this currency is for sharing not saving,” the currency webpage explains.  “The value of this currency comes through its use — its current.  The rules of today’s dollar system rationalize hoarding and controlling money to make more money.  The needs of healthy people and living water are denied not because there isn’t enough money in the world, but because it makes ‘sense’ to accumulate/hoard more and to spend it otherwise.”

The issuers of the Currency of Care make the point that “money is not just a medium of exchange, but a disciplinary force on what we value, the story of a meaningful life, and our position within this story.”  The point of the currency project is to promote a new vision of money and value:

“We need a new story for money and a new currency can help us tell it.  Right now our money commodifies time, ideas, muscle, relationships, and all of creation in order to create more money.  But what if the value of money was based on caring for water?….

“There is no money to be made protecting water as the source of life.  Financing Great Lakes care today comes through either altruistic charity or legislated compensation.  Water restoration costs are a fractional expense for a pollution-based economic system.  Advocating for a friendlier version of the current system denies its core impulses and interests.  Let’s be honest — degrading the living earth makes obscene amounts of money and defines our current story about ‘progress.’”

Inaugurating an actual, tradeable currency that asserts its own type of value and creates new circuits of value is, of course, a very complicated enterprise.  Just ask the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, which has successfully developed the BerkShares currency in western Massachusetts.

The Currency of Care should not be mistaken for such a project.  It is more of a performance art project and public-education campaign that asks us to think about reconnecting money’s value with our values.  It asks us base the value of currency on things that really matter, such as the integrity of the Great Lakes as an ecosystem.

To promote new stories of value, the project invites people who receive or give the notes to share their stories on the Great Lakes Commons online map. People are asked to share:  “What was it like getting and sharing the notes? What kinds of conversations did it spark?  What types of past/future actions did people reward?  Where did their note go or where did it come from?”

One supporter of the Great Lakes Charter Declaration, Steve Edgier, gave his notes to activists who are protecting the Great Lakes from stormwater runoff and monitoring for sewage discharges.  Another person gave a Currency of Care to the Marquette Poets Circle for their work in “tending poetry and community along the wild shore of Lake Superior.”

Since its inception several years ago, Great Lakes Commons has done great work in helping people to express and imagine relationships of care to those much-abused bodies of water. Here’s hoping that the Currency of Care widens the circle of engagement.

The post Great Lakes Commons Issues “Currency of Care” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Assembly of the Commons of Grenoble: building the city together

It was with great pleasure that I met Anne-Sophie and Antoine during my journey, while taking a break in the beautiful city of Grenoble. We happily shared the practices of the Lille and Grenoble assemblies of the commons over a coffee at a sidewalk cafe.

Anne-Sophie and Antoine were both elected to positions in city hall. They shared stories with me of citizens engaged in a dynamic of counterpower and, after being elected in 2014, of their difficulty in taking on an institutional posture. Changing culture is not always easy! But this is what also makes the Grenoble Assembly of the Commons so special, born of the meeting of two dynamics.

The first of these two comes from Nuit Debout, within which a “Commission of the Commons” was created in 2016. The idea was to discuss the management of commons as a common responsibility: not only the responsibility of public authorities, but also of the area’s inhabitants.

The second dynamic, on the part of city hall, was the philosophically interesting idea of investing in a space between the private and the public, to make room for citizens in the public debate. The key here is that this idea has not been abandoned at all, in fact it unites activists and elected representatives in the same assembly today.

Last March, during the Biennale of Cities in Transition, partners and associations were invited to the assembly. About fifty people from various backgrounds participated in this first assembly, including Sylvia Fredricksson and Michel Briand, both well-known French commoners who came to share their experiences.

What the elected representatives underline is that even if they have the will to make a difference in the direction of greater citizen involvement in public life, it is not so simple. Legislation is not adapted at all, particularly with regard to risk management (the insurance framework does not exist). On top of that, officials are not so aware, and not trained to work directly with citizens. Faced with this, the elected representatives asked the services to work on these points and advance the texts and practices.

Nevertheless, among the completed projects at the town hall level, there have been agreements created for occupying public spaces such as shared gardens, for example. The assembly also discussed the idea of writing a charter on housing, a bit like in Bologna (Italy), where a charter of urban commons was drafted and signed by some forty Italian cities.

The city also participates in a “migrants’ platform” to accompany reception initiatives.There are also participatory budgets: every year, 800K€ in investment is opened to citizens’ projects. 106 projects proposed by the Grenoble region were selected in 2017. On the cultural side, we can cite the desire to take art out of museums with the Street Art Festival, whose traces can be found all over the city walls.

To date, the Assembly of the Commons has set up four separate working groups which meet asynchronously at regular intervals:

• Natural Commons
• Knowledge Commons
• Urban Commons
• Commons of Health and Well-being

The spirit of commons in Grenoble has a long history. After the Second World War, unlike many other places, the city had, for quite a while, retained its own operators to manage electricity and water, which made it a very special case.

After being privatized in the 1980s, water came back into the public domain after a citizens’ lengthy legal battle with certain elected environmental officials and some employees of the water authority. This was the first battle won in France for water municipalization, along with the first French users’ committee to make the citizens’ involvement in water management last. The whole world visits Grenoble for its water management model. And on the electricity and gas side, the operator is a mixed-economy company but the public (the city of Grenoble) is still the majority shareholder.

This civic expertise and spirit of solidarity continue today, and are embodied in the city’s desire to be part of a concrete, lasting relationship between two communities that “do with others”, all the others…

The post Summer of Commoning 3: The Assembly of the Commons of Grenoble appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In news stories about these tax liens, the references are to “residents” and “homes,” not businesses. If that seems familiar, it should. Back in 2014, when the “Emergency Manager” in Detroit was carrying out similar mass cutoffs, Homrich (the crony capitalist firm hired to handle the cutoffs) only pursued residential accounts that were in arrears. The cutoff policy did not apply to business accounts — some of which owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in back payments — despite the fact that they constituted almost half of the total amount owed. And remember: as is the case in most communities, businesses were charged a lower rate per gallon than residences.

If Flint had charged residential and commercial/industrial water users the same rates in the first place, and followed the same policy on collecting past-due bills for both, it’s a safe bet to say that far fewer residents would be in arrears and facing the loss of their homes today.

For a further point of similarity, consider California Governor Jerry Brown, whose so-called “water rationing” executive order applied only to residential users, and not to giant agribusiness operations consuming massive amounts of irrigation water.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that both Michigan and California allow vulture capitalist corporations like Nestle to pump millions of gallons out of aquifers for next to nothing and then sell it by the bottle.

Put all these things together, and what do you get? The water supply — groundwater, natural bodies of water, and other reservoirs — is a commons. The capital infrastructure for delivering this water to households and businesses, having been built at the expense of ratepayers and taxpayers, is also a commons. And like innumerable commons of the past, the water commons have been enclosed by governments whose primary purpose is to provide subsidized infrastructure for capitalist enterprises. In some cases, this infrastructure is then sold or leased to such capitalist enterprises, who then run them at a profit at the expense of consumers.

When the water commons is enclosed and run for the benefit of capital, or actually run by capital itself, price-gouging and favoritism to business are only to be expected. And every step in the process is characterized by collusion and self-dealing. That’s the nature of the capitalist state: to subsidize inputs, socialize costs and risks, and facilitate the privatization of profit.

In 17th century England, a band of landless peasants who called themselves the Diggers tore down the enclosures at St. George’s Hill, built cottages on the land, and began to cultivate it in common. Today, the only ultimate solution is the same: reclaim the commons. We should mutualize water utilities and other commons as social (not private or state) property, under the direct control of the users themselves.

The post Flint: Enclosure of the Water Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Kosmos is pleased to award a 2017 Seed Grant to Great Lakes Commons (GLC). The Great Lakes Commons cares for the protection of the second largest freshwater source in the world through education, interventions, and water protection.

GLC is a diverse network of people and organizations working to preserve the bioregional area of the Great Lakes and establish it as a commons—a resource that people collectively share, inherit, protect, and enjoy. With this grant, the GLC will explore an experimental econo-art intervention to rethink currency, value, and the impact money has on the world around us.

The pilot project will test people’s imagination and commitment for not only a new relationship with water, but with the money system that spoils it. The project asks: What if the value of currency was based on clean, available water—a commons-backed currency, rather than one based on our current measure of value? What would this money look like?  How would this money be used?

With the Seed Grant Award, GLC plans to produce 5,000 alternative currency notes for distribution to their Charter Supporters. One side of the currency will include information about water and special instructions. Receivers are encouraged to circulate the money, perhaps in gratitude to someone working in water protection, possibly to a teacher, or as a gift. The water commons-note will inspire receivers to imagine the possibilities associated with a new value system, and they’ll be directed to share their experiences and reactions online at GLC’s collective community website.

Statement from Great Lakes Commons:

The Great Lakes Commons initiative is a bioregional aspiration and invitation for protecting these waters as a sacred trust and shared commons. We express and advance our effort through a Commons Charter, collaborative storytelling map, and a set of tools and resources for ‘commoning’. At our core, we are a united community working on Great Lakes protection from different campaigns, locations, and cultural ties. We seek a deeper relationship with the waters and all those who live within this basin.

We are grateful to Kosmos Journal for funding our Great Lakes Commons Currency project. By sharing 5,000 new water-commons notes to our Charter supporters around the lakes, we can create new pathways for shared responsibility, reciprocity, and connection to the Great Lakes. The stories of how this currency circulates and what impact it makes will be shared on our collaborative map and with the Kosmos community.”

– Paul Baines, GLC’s Outreach and Education Coordinator

The post The Great Lakes Commons “Water Currency” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Shayda Naficy: Dear friends and allies:

I am writing today to ask you to urgently add your organization’s name to a sign-on letter we are circulating in support of the Our Water Our Right coalition in Lagos. As you may know, the Our Water Our Right coalition in Lagos, Nigeria is standing against government plans for water privatization and calling for adequate public investment to ensure the realization of the human right to water in the city of 21 million.

We are asking you to stand with us today to oppose a bill that endangers the human right to water and sanitation in Lagos by criminalizing informal water access and promoting privatization.

Below is more information on the threat, and the sign-on letter to the Governor of Lagos.

Please add your organization name to the sign-on letter by emailing [email protected] with your organization name and country (if country specific).

Also, as an individual, please sign this petition!

New bill threatens human right to water in Lagos

The Assembly has not released a final version of the legislation, called, “A Bill for a Law to Consolidate all Laws relating to the Environment for the Management, Protection and Sustainable Development of the Environment in Lagos State and for Connected Purposes.’”

A draft version of the bill included provisions that would threaten people’s access to water by:

• Criminalizing unauthorized distribution of water or taking water from natural sources, by imposing 6 weeks’ imprisonment and/or a fine of over five times the monthly minimum wage in Lagos.
• Require licensing of boreholes, which about 58 percent of Lagosians depend on for water.

Further, the bill would promote privatization by:

• Requiring the state to prioritize payment for “contracted services and concessions for long term infrastructure investments” above all other budget items.

This bill was passed by the Lagos House of Assembly with minimal public consultation and over public protest. At the single public hearing on February 9, civil society representatives spoke against and protested the bill. Most Lagosians did not even have time to consider this bill before it was passed in this hurried manner — consideration and passage of the bill took place over a period of only two weeks, during a time at which the Assembly would have normally been in recess.

Threat of privatization

At the same time, the Lagos State Water Corporation is trying to push through a number of privatization contracts and other measures that threaten the human right to water in Lagos.

These include:

• A 25-year Build-Finance-Operate-Transfer concession for the Adiyan II water treatment plant and distribution network.
• A public-private partnership (PPP) related to a 100 mgd water treatment plant, Odomola, for which no details have been released.
• Two consulting contracts that would facilitate future privatization by mapping assets and enumerating customers to increase revenues.
• The planned installation of up to 16 thousand pre-paid water meters, which threaten the human right to water of people unable to afford it.

These measures, if carried out, could place over half of Lagos’ water production under private control, and would threaten low income peoples’ access to water. Experience around the world has shown that water privatization leads to increased costs, infrastructure neglect, labor abuses, and erosion of democratic control. In Lagos as elsewhere, privatization is not the answer.

Global concern

On February 27, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, Léo Heller, raised serious concern about the recent environment bill, saying, “When the State fails to provide adequate access to drinking water, no one should be criminalized or fined for fetching water from lakes, rivers, or any other natural sources.” According to his statement, “Mr. Heller is urging the Government to reconsider the Bill and to conduct a proper and meaningful public consultation with all relevant stakeholders providing an adequate time for comments and opinions.”

Just as Mr. Heller is speaking up for the right to water in Lagos, We ask you to stand with the Our Water, Our Right coalition by asking Lagos Governor Akinwunmi Ambode to:

• Do everything in his power to halt the implementation of the damaging environment bill recently passed by the Assembly.
• Withdraw current efforts to secure corporate concessions and contracts in the water sector.
• Commit to public funding of water and ensure a robust and accountable democratic process for implementing any legislation relating to water and sanitation.

Thank you for standing in solidarity with Lagos. Together we can ensure a future where all people can access the water they need to live healthy, dignified lives.

Onward,

Akinbode Oluwafemi

Deputy Executive Director

Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria

Shayda Edwards Naficy

Senior Program Director

Corporate Accountability International

Sign-On Letter Text

Dear Governor Akinwunmi Ambode:

We are organizations around the world committed to ensuring the human right to water is upheld and protected. We recently read with concern a statement from the Special Rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, Léo Heller, regarding an environmental bill recently passed in Lagos.

We were alarmed to discover this bill criminalizes unauthorized water abstraction and distribution, which a majority of Lagosians depend on to meet their daily drinking, bathing and cooking needs.

We were equally alarmed to see that the bill prioritizes the payment of private contract and concession expenses before any other government expense, no matter how urgent. Having seen the unintended costs and harmful consequences of private water contracts and concessions elsewhere in the world, we are deeply concerned about the implications of this provision on the human rights and well-being of the people of Lagos.

As such, we echo UN Special Rapporteur Heller’s plea to Lagos lawmakers to “reconsider the Bill and to conduct a proper and meaningful public consultation with all relevant stakeholders providing an adequate time for comments and opinions.”

In addition, we are deeply concerned to see the Lagos State Water Corporation pursuing multiple concessions and other corporate contracts, including a 25-year concession for the Adiyan II project and a public private partnership (PPP) for the Odomola project. Based on many of our experiences in cities around the world, we know that PPPs and other privatization contracts often bring unexpected costs for cities, raise rates for consumers, and produce labor violations and infrastructure neglect.

Given these concerns, we wish to express our profound hope that you will:

• Do everything in your power to halt the implementation of the damaging environment bill recently passed by the Assembly.
• Withdraw current efforts to secure corporate concessions and contracts in the water sector.
• Commit to public funding of water and ensure robust and accountable democratic process for implementing any legislation relating to water and sanitation.

In conclusion, we are eager to see your administration commit to ensuring the human right to water through a democratic, public system. Your leadership on water will not only ensure all Lagosians can access clean, safe water — it will also set an example for all of us around the world.

Sincerely,

cc: Dr. Samuel Babatunde Adejare, Honourable Commissioner, Lagos State Ministry of the Environment

Rt. Hon. Mudashiru Ajayi Obasa, Speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly

Hon. Dayo Saka Fafunmi, Chairman , House Committee on Environment, Lagos State House of Assembly

Photo by boellstiftung

The post Urgent action for water as commons in Lagos appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In Valais, Switzerland, a network of “artificial canals” was rediscovered in the 1980s. They were “drilled and built into mountainsides, enabling the irrigation so important to land cultivation by transporting water across several kilometers,” as Auguste Vautier recounts (1942:19). Above and beyond their original purpose, the canals have become important for tourism today, contributing to the establishment of popular hiking trails, among other things. The irrigation canals are of interest in connection with the commons because of their long history of collective management.

Irrigation canals were mentioned in the Swiss Alpine canton Valais for the first time in thirteenth century documents that referred to structures that had likely been built 200 years before. Yet it was not until the fifteenth century that the Golden Age of the bisses dawned. Historically speaking, the development of the network of canals can be explained by events that left deep scars across Europe: the plague of 1349 and the epidemics that followed. The population of Valais was hit hard by these epidemics and was decimated by at least 30 to 50 percent. The decline of population density in the Alps in turn meant that land that had previously been used for growing grain was freed up for other purposes. At the same time, the demand for beef increased sharply in the cities of northern Italy. These two factors prompted the farmers of Valais to increase their herds of cattle and to convert their land into hayfields. They had to build the famed canals to transport water from the mountains to their pastureland. So the owners of the hayfields and pastures joined forces, and “collective operations [began] which often involved the entire village community,” as one researcher of the canals, Muriel Borgeat, has said.

In the nineteenth century, population pressure and the expansion of vineyards sparked a new phase of irrigation canal construction. In 1924, there were 300 irrigation canals totaling approximately 2,000 kilometers (Schnyder 1924:218). The last survey in the canton of Valais, in 1992 (unpublished), found 190 extant irrigation canals spanning a distance of at least 731 kilometers.

One of these canals is part of the Savièse irrigation system. It was built in several stages. More than a century after it was put into operation in 1430, it was expanded through an impressive wall of rock in order to increase its holding capacity. Hundreds of years later, in 1935, a tunnel through the Prabé Mountain was finally completed, making it easier to maintain the system and to pipe the water across the high plateau. The sections of the bisse built at dizzying heights were then abandoned. Only in 2005 did some enthusiasts of the Association for the Protection of Torrent-Neuf¹ decide to reconstruct this emblematic part of the bisse with the support of the municipality of Savièse. This section bears witness to the high-wire acts undertaken by earlier generations in order to secure irrigation.

The traditional form of common management of the bisse has endured. Since the Middle Ages the feudal lords granted the rural communities water-use rights, either to the entire community or to a group of people who joined together in a community of users, a consortage. Such a consortage has always had a special statute that determines the rules for use of the system, details of construction (what, by whom, how), maintenance, financial management, and monitoring of the canal system. In the spring, the canals had to be cleaned, and sections damaged in the winter had to be repaired so they would again hold water. Women attended to sealing the wooden channels, collecting twigs and branches and stuffing holes. Today, municipal employees take care of this job, occasionally supported by passionate volunteers.

Members of the consortage were granted certain rights to use water proportional to the area of land they cultivated, and for a precisely defined period of time. Each family’s coat of arms and its allotment of water rights were carved into a wooden stick. The rights were distributed at regular intervals. “Water thieves” – people who violated the rules of distribution or disregarded the relevant time periods – were punished. “Water theft was considered a serious offense, and the community treated the thief with contempt” (Annales Valsannes 1995:348).

Managing the gates controlling the flow of water was a responsibility of great power because water supply was so fundamental to the farmers. Setting the gates was usually a task reserved for the canal guards (gardes des bisses) who saw to the proper condition of the system and guaranteed passage of the largest amount of water possible. Of course, this form of communal organization also reflected a commitment to shared values such as solidarity. Yet as historian and archivist Denis Reynard told us in an interview in July 2014, “It was first and foremost economic reasons that forced the landowners to join forces.

It was a way to keep the system going. It was always a necessity, first for farming cattle, and in the nineteenth century, for growing wine. Joint management was a good solution.” When we ask whether this management system will endure over the long term, he gets more concrete: “It works if people have a common economic interest – for example, in farming, cattle raising or growing wine. If that isn’t the case, then it has no future.”

Up to this day, the consortage of Savièse is responsible for irrigating the vines. Since common economic interests no longer connect the farmers as strongly as in the past, maintenance of the canals has become problematic. One possibility would be for the municipality to take over management of the system. The establishment of the Association for the Protection of Torrent-Neuf sparked new interest in the bisse as a piece of cultural heritage. “That made restoration possible, but it isn’t a consortage,” explained Reynard.

The Bisse de Savièse is majestic. It has been repaired, and it is located in the midst of a protected Alpine landscape. Thanks to the association, management today still functions similarly to the original system. Yet use of the system has changed. As a tourist attraction, cultural heritage and irrigation infrastructure – all at the same time – thebisse tells the story of the development of a Valais commons over the course of centuries.

References

Akten der Internationalen Kolloquien zu den Bewässerungskanälen, Sion, September 15-18, 1994, sowie 2. bis September 5, 2010, Annales valaisannes, 1995 and 2010-2011.

Reynard, Emmanuel. 2002. Histoires d’eau: bisses et irrigation en Valais au XVe siècle, Lausanner Hefte zur Geschichte des Mittelalters (Cahiers lausannois d’histoire médiévale) 30, Lausanne.ders. 2008. Les bisses du Valais, un exemple de gestion durable de l’eau?, Lémaniques, 69, Genf, S. 1-6.

Schnyder, Theo. 1924. “Das Wallis und seine Bewässerungsanlagen,” in Schweizer Landwirtschaftliche Monatshefte, S. 214-218.

Vautier, Auguste. 1942. Au pays des bisses, 2. Auflage, Lausanne.

Eric Nanchen (Switzerland) is a geographer and director of the Foundation for the Sustainable Development of Mountain Regions (www.fddm.ch). He focuses on development policy, in particular the effects of global and climatic changes on the Alpine world.

Muriel Borgeat (Switzerland) is an historian and project director at the Foundation for the Sustainable Development of Mountain Regions. Her research concerns the history of Valais and Rhône.

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 website for more resources.

Photo by Dave Lonsdale

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