In the border district of Chamoli in Uttarakhand a powerful action Smt Mandodari Devi to protect her meadows and grazing land has brought back the memories of Chipko resistance. Mandodari Devi fought with the CISF Jawans who tried to stop her accessing the village Charagah or what is termed as Common Property Resource and snatched her fodder which she had[Read More…]
The Indian National Congress under the leadership of Prime Minister Mr Rajiv Gandhi was responsible for the beginning of half-hearted liberalisation policies in the name of economic development and modernisation in India. The half-hearted liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation policies have become the cornerstone of new economic policies launched by the Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh. These policies are in full[Read More…]
In common parlance, a “public good” refers to a commodity or service that becomes available to all members of a society with equal access, without discrimination. There are more rigorous definitions of this in economics. However, one simple way to describe a public good is to say that it is not possible to prevent individuals selectively from consuming it, unless[Read More…]
Wall Street investors have hit the jackpot. Soon they’ll be able to buy, own, and dictate The Commons, public lands, the world of Mother Nature. In fact, a pilot project is already in the works with ecosystems up for sale as Wall-Streeters anxiously prepare to gobble up the valued benefits of Mother Nature. According to the NYSE PR Dept. they’ll[Read More…]
The path to an ecological civilization is paved by reclaiming the commons—our common home, the Earth, and the commons of the Earth family, of which we are a part. Through reclaiming the commons, we can imagine possibility for our common future, and we can sow the seeds of abundance through “commoning.” In the commons, we care and share—for the Earth[Read More…]
The commons is a concept originally used in England during the Middle Ages to designate shared areas (mostly woods and pasture lands) that peasants collectively managed to access basic resources such as firewood, foraged food or grazing for their cattle. In a mostly rural society, peasants relied on the commons for survival. In fact, the appropriation and plunder of the[Read More…]
An interview with Daniel Chavez. What are the commons and what is their political, social and economic relevance? In recent years, many researchers and social activists from very different countries, like myself, have rediscovered the notion of the commons as a key idea to deepen social and environmental justice and democratise both politics and the economy. This reappropriation has meant[Read More…]
An interview with Daniel Chavez Daniel Chavez / Photo credit Patricia Alfaro In recent years, many researchers and social activists from very different countries, like myself, have rediscovered the notion of the commons as a key idea to deepen social and environmental justice and democratise both politics and the economy. This reappropriation has meant questioning the vanguardist and hierarchical visions,[Read More…]
The first vast work of “worldwide” occupation and predation of the Earth and its inhabitants was that begun in the sixteenth century by a number of European states (Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, England and France). After the First World War, new actors – no less conquerors and predators than the former (in particular, the United States, Soviet Union, Japan and[Read More…]
What exactly are ‘commons’? What resources should come under the umbrella idea of commons? Who owns them? Who should govern and regulate them? Who should it benefit and what has been the practise so far? All these are extremely complex questions involving a layered and extensive understanding of history, societal context, political and economic dispensation, and more. Academic scholarship has[Read More…]
The Belgian city of Ghent plays host to a broad range of projects and initiatives around the commons. But it has yet to adopt a model which really places a commons-focused approach and logic at the core of its institutions and processes. Recent work undertaken by experts on the commons provides a roadmap for the city to re-imagine and reconfigure[Read More…]
The Labour Party in the UK, which has a good chance of taking political power at the next election, has been involved in a process of policy development which involves taking up ideas from the commons movement and is focused around the revival of and protection of commons. In one week I have now been to three public events commemorating[Read More…]
Is it possible to historicize the commons, to describe the evolution of the commons over time? This is our first draft and preliminary attempt to do so. To do this we must of course define the commons. We generally agree with the definition that was given by David Bollier and others and which derives from the work of Elinor Ostrom[Read More…]
In considering the essential problem of how to produce and distribute material wealth, virtually all of the great economists in Western history have ignored the significance of the commons—the shared resources of nature and society that people inherit, create and utilize. Despite sharp differences in concept and ideology, economic thinkers from Smith, Ricardo, and Marx to Keynes, Hayek, Mises and Schumpeter[Read More…]
K.P Sasi is a film maker, writer, activist and cartoonist. He can be reached at kpsasi36@gmail.com
A few times a year, my parents took me to a restaurant in NYC when I was very young, indeed under school age. For the occasion, my parents asked me to dress-up – to put on best fancy clothes and shoes, my patent leather ones — all black, shiny and perfect to go out on the town. I complied. So[Read More…]
How relocating energy in the commons helps scaling-up renewables & saving energy Is energy a mere commodity, or is it a common good? Why is this relevant in the first place? Here we look at why energy is part of our commons, from the sources to the product itself. In a second time, we will see that relocating energy in[Read More…]
Some believe that the commons are incompatible with commodity markets. Others claim that markets and commons may form mutually beneficial relations with each other. What are your own views on this issue? I think it is entirely possible for markets and commons to “play nicely together,” but only if commoners can have “value sovereignty” over their resources and community governance. [Read More…]
The following piece is extracted from a series of reviews on Common: An Essay on Revolution in the 21st Century, a book by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, from which Martin O’Shaughnessy summarizes the authors´ nine political propositions: In an earlier post (here), I summed up Dardot and Laval’s position on how we should think the common. What I want to do[Read More…]
The United Nations is currently preparing a world conference 5-7 June 2017 devoted to the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goal N° 14: Conserve and sustainable use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development. Non-governmental organizations in consultative status with the U.N. are invited to submit recommendations for the governmental working group which is meeting 24 to 27 April[Read More…]
What is “value” and how shall we protect it? It’s a simple question for which we don’t have a satisfactory answer. For conventional economists and politicians, the answer is simple: value is essentially the same as price. Value results when private property and “free markets” condense countless individual preferences and purchases into a single, neutral representation of value: price. That[Read More…]
As a developed set of social practices, techniques and ethical norms, permaculture has a lot to say to the world of the commons. This is immediately clear from reading the twelve design principles of permaculture that David Holmgren enumerated in his 2002 book Permaculture: Principles and Practices Beyond Sustainability. It mentions such principles as “catch and store energy,” “apply self-regulation[Read More…]
What is at the heart of the problems erupting worldwide? Is anything good emerging from these multiple crises? Can a new system grow from within the old one? Is it already here, visible and thriving? These questions are addressed by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Niaros in this report, Value in the Commons Economy, co-published by Heinrich Böll Foundation and the[Read More…]
In Argentina, people with damaged or broken items meet to repair them at the Repair Club. You can find them on Saturday afternoons, in a park, plaza or workshop, involved in what looks like a strange choreography: they’re not buying or selling, eating or dancing. Instead, they’re repairing things. Clothes, home appliances, toys, books, bicycles: even the most hopeless items[Read More…]
Latin America is a witness to experiments by leftward leaning heads of states particularly in Venezuela, Bolivia and Equador. These are often seen as anti-US, anti-market, autocratic and have been demonized in the western media. These shifts happened after growing discontent with devastating effects of neoliberal policies in these countries. New leaders such as Hugo Chavez, Evo Molares and Rafael[Read More…]
Poromboke is an old Tamil word meaning shared-use community resources like waterbodies, seashore and grazing lands that are not assessed for tax purposes. Today, it has become a bad word used to describe worthless people or places. Chennai Poromboke Paadal is part of a campaign to reclaim the word and restore its worth. Credits: Featuring TM Krishna Concept: Nityanand Jayaraman[Read More…]
Cat Johnson: What would it take to move from planetary imbalance into a state of sustained health and healing? In a recent report, Jamie Harvie, Executive Director of the Institute for a Sustainable Future and founder of the Commons Health Network, argues that we need a new health system, one based on a “profound appreciation of the complexity and interconnectedness of life across[Read More…]
On a visit to Barcelona last week, I learned a great deal about the City’s pioneering role in developing “the city as a commons.” I also learned that crystallizing a new commons paradigm – even in a city committed to cooperatives and open digital networks – comes with many gnarly complexities. The Barcelona city government is led by former housing[Read More…]
A critical turn is needed in discussions of blockchain — the tech that underpins the virtual currency bitcoin – especially with respect to it as a phenomenon of the so-called fourth industrial age.1 Many have been swept-up in (if not duped by) the swell of excitement around a technological architecture which appeared, at first sight, to puncture the power and[Read More…]
Climate change is viewed by many as a classic case of ‘tragedy of the commons’ i.e. anything used commonly and freely by people is not cared for by anyone. ‘Commons’ are usually natural resources such as air, land, water, forests, and fish. Thus, they are not anybody’s private property. The most cited example of this ‘tragedy’ is that of overgrazing[Read More…]
At least we have some clarity. The mystifications and rationalizations are evaporating. If nothing else, the election of Donald Trump illuminates many of the deep structural problems that we need to face squarely. While most post-election commentary is focused on Trump and the political realignment in Washington, I think the bigger stories are the tectonic shifts in the neoliberal political[Read More…]
In the 2011 dystopian film In Time, Justin Timberlake works literally to earn his living, as the monthly currency is additional time for living. Billionaires can live for thousands of years, practically becoming immortals, while poor people struggle to survive every day, many of them failing in that endeavour. This science fiction film resembles painstakingly our real world, although instead[Read More…]
Ethiopia is home to one of the oldest, most effective conservation management systems in sub-Saharan Africa, the Menz-Guassa Community Conservation Area, an 11,100-hectare region that is home to a rich endowment of grasslands, plants and rare animals such as the Ethiopian wolf, gelada and Abyssinian hare. The history of the indigenous land tenure system known as Atsme Irist 1 reveals a[Read More…]
In the Vrancea Mountains of Romania, the Eastern Carpathians, people in dozens of villages have used community-based institutions known as obştea to manage forest commons since the sixteenth century.1 The original sense of the word, coming from Slavonic, is “togetherness,” and it underlines the participatory essence of the institution. The traditions of obştea are so deeply rooted among Vrâncean villagers[Read More…]
As soon as we start speaking about “globalization,” we inevitably associate it with the excessive financial markets that are disconnected from the real economy. There is less public awareness of another type of globalization that also involves the forced unification of institutions all over the world: the institution of private property and privatization strategies. The driving forces behind this development[Read More…]
The greatest problem of our time is that for centuries we have been steadily weaned away from treating our common resources responsibly and carefully so that they can either regenerate or be repaired or replaced after use. Until the Middle Ages local resources such as pastures, woods and fishing waters were really handled that way. But since the 16th century,[Read More…]
The ideas and theories of Elinor Ostrom, one of the world’s leading economic scholars studying the way people in communities cooperate (or don’t), have inspired their own collective action hub. It includes students and scholars of many disciplines as well as people actively involved in managing community water use, organizing fishing industries, delivering urban services, and operating cooperatives. This “hub”[Read More…]
The “common heritage of mankind” is an ethical concept and a general concept of international law. It establishes that some localities belong to all humanity and that their resources are available for everyone’s use and benefit, taking into account future generations and the needs of developing countries. It is intended to achieve aspects of the sustainable development of common spaces[Read More…]
If the human species is going to overcome the many interconnected ecological catastrophes now confronting us, this moment in history requires that we entertain some bold modifications of our legal structures and political culture. We must find the means to introduce new ideas for effective and just environmental protection – locally, nationally, regionally, globally, and points in between
The “peer to peer” and commons-oriented vision for a new type of civilization and economic system starts from an analysis of what is fundamentally wrong with the current economic system. Rather than put forward a utopian ideal, the P2P vision is based on generalizing the already emerging forms of peer production, peer governance, and peer property
Buen Vivir is a proposal aimed at making visible and expressible aspects of reality that are ignored by the dominant paradigm. It is a proposal from a radical and spiritual perspective of ecology, and is logically incompatible with development and industrialization. It speaks of the possibility of living in common, for which the very concept “development” is not only insufficient but mistaken.
In this essay, we look at the case of the “salt collectors” of the PinkLake, also called Lake Retba or Lac Rose, in the rural area of Dakar, Senegal, and the development of communities’ sustenance
The reintroduction of a multiparty system in Nepal in 1990 after the peaceful revolution against the autocratic Monarchial Panchayat regime1 provided political space for communities to get organized and manage common pool resources, including water and forest. The state established new policies and funding mechanisms to support the evolution of new types of grassroots-based, self-governing institutions. The energies released from this[Read More…]
The commons is no magic talisman, nor a panacea. Nor are network platforms. But they do enable us to rediscover that sovereignty does not ultimately reside in the state or market (especially in these times), but within ourselves, together.
About a year ago, a weather-beaten, middle-aged man asked me for money on the platform of the Mountain View Caltrain station. I gave him three dollars. He thanked me, and asked what I did for work. I introduced myself, learned his name, Jeff, and we shook hands. I pulled out a card from my computer bag, and handed it to[Read More…]
The path of Japan’s economic and social development after World War II has followed the trajectory of most industrialized countries: the pursuit of high economic growth on the assumption that higher per capita income would ensure people’s life satisfaction. But, according to a survey published by the Japanese central government, life satisfaction constantly declined from 1984 to 2005. Two out[Read More…]
By Association of Students for Equitable Access to Knowledge (ASEAK) In a rare and incredible order on 16th September 2016, the Delhi High Court dismissed the copyright infringement case filed in August 2012 by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Taylor and Francis Group against Rameshwari Photocopy Shop in Delhi School of Economics and Delhi University. Justice R.S. Endlaw[Read More…]
The text below is a second installment from my essay, “Transnational Republics of Commoning: Reinventing Governance through Emergent Networking,” published by Friends of the Earth UK. The third and final part of the essay will appear next. Read Part I Digital Commons as a New Species of Production and Governance To return to our original question: How can we develop[Read More…]
I am often asked what the commons has to contribute to solving our climate change problems. Since most commons are rather small scale and local, there is a presumption that such commons cannot possibly deal with a problem as massive and literally global as climate change. I think this view is mistaken. The nation-state as now constituted, in its close[Read More…]
Let’s engage in a way to produce goods and create value that is free, fair, and sustainable! What is peer production and commons economics? More importantly, how can they help bring about a thriving economy that work for people and planet? The following 10 ideas for action are the result of 10 years of research at the P2P Foundation on the[Read More…]
The four-yearly World Conservation Congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature has just taken place in Hawai’i. The congress is the largest global meeting on nature’s conservation. This year a controversial motion was debated regarding incorporating the language and mechanisms of “natural capital” into IUCN policy. But what is “natural capital”? And why use it to refer[Read More…]
One of the most controversially discussed key tracks during the 5th International Degrowth Conference 2016 in Budapest was “Degrowth and other social movements”. Can degrowth be considered a movement? Does degrowth embrace all kinds of movements struggling for a sustainable future? On one hand, the notion of “degrowth movement(s)” was rigorously criticized for fragmenting the political struggle. It was also[Read More…]
Streets and plazas are the spaces of the public, the spaces where people encounter each other. Such encounters can be fleeting or intense, but they always imply the possibility of lingering. Yet lingering is difficult if not impossible if our roads are designed to serve the needs of traffic practically to the exclusion of everything else. The concept of Shared[Read More…]
In the face of multiple converging crises, mere sustainability is no longer enough. Too much damage has already been done. We need to restore ecosystem and community health, and create regenerative systems that allow us to face uncertainty creatively. After the post-war Baby Boomers came Generation X, followed by Generation Y – the millennials – and Generation Z – the[Read More…]
Co-Written By Margrit Kennedy & Declan Kennedy Since 1985, an intentional community of about 100 adults and 40 children in the middle of Lower Saxony, Germany, has created the “Lebensgarten Steyerberg” out of a munitions factory housing project built in the late 1930s for World War II.1 The anchor of the community, which is spread out over 65 buildings, is a large community[Read More…]
“How would we know when we are commoning?” a young woman asked me at Contact Summit 2011, a major unconference running concurrently with the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, October 2011. (An “unconference” is a gathering based on participant-generated content.) When I announced the invitation to my session on commoning, I introduced it by quoting the motto of[Read More…]
By now, local currencies and alternative exchange systems have become familiar themes in the media, even in mainstream newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, as well as on both local and network TV. These reports focus mainly on attempts to keep money circulating locally instead of “leaking out,” as a way of enhancing the vitality[Read More…]
In September 2010, a group of NATO brass, security analysts and other policy elites held a conference called “Protecting the Global Commons.” Attendees were described as “senior representatives from the EU institutions and NATO, with national government officials, industry, the international and specialised media, think-tanks, academia and NGOs” – surely one of the oddest group of “commoners” ever assembled. The[Read More…]
Even as worldwide pressures mount to protect sites with high biological diversity, indigenous peoples and local communities are redoubling their struggles of resistance against a “solution” that claims to protect ecosystems, the establishment of protected natural areas (PNAs). The policy of establishing PNAs, which seeks to maintain the best conserved redoubts of the planet, is often at odds with the[Read More…]
Lithium and cobalt for producing automobile batteries; titanium, chrome and palladium for desalination of sea water; ruthenium and selenium for photovoltaics, rare earths1 for cellphones and laptops – European industry relies on minerals, most of which must be imported, for developing and using numerous technologies of the future. Long-term security of supply of so-called “critical” raw materials was not considered an[Read More…]
These notes offer a quick glance to ways, in the south of Mexico, in which people are regenerating the society from the bottom up. It is a new kind of revolution without leaders or vanguards, which goes beyond development and globalization. It is about displacing the economy from the center of social life, reclaiming a communal way of being, encouraging[Read More…]
Today economic crisis is a capitalist crisis of social stability, not a simple recession—that is, a crisis that requires a realignment of class/power relations and new systems of governance in order to re-establish growth and accumulation.1 The last two times in which a real change in capital’s governance occurred (in the post-World War II period with the embrace of “Keynesianism” and[Read More…]
The history of the commons can be read as the expansion of the market sphere and of private decision-making over goods that hitherto were subject to common rules. From this point of view, the late 20th century technologies are double-edged: They have made it possible to expand the commons by offering new modes of regulation, favoring the non-market sphere and[Read More…]
Very often, the collective assertions of movements for economic, political or social justice represent just the surface of a complex agenda. If one clicks on their claims, like on a hypertext, one might unravel its layers and discover the less visible spheres of values, traditions and philosophies that animate them – in short, the identities of the people involved. It[Read More…]
Half the tropical forests in the world – the lungs of our ecosystems – are gone; by 2030, at the current rate of harvest, only 10 percent will be left standing. Ninety percent of the big fish in the sea are gone, victim to wanton predatory fishing practices. Says a prominent scientist studying their demise, “There is no blue frontier[Read More…]
The latest cycle of mining expansion in South America dates from the mid-1990s. Since then, levels of investment in exploration and exploitation have generally held steady. Such investment has benefited from reforms in the laws governing mining in almost all countries, and the high demand for basic minerals for industrial use, especially in China and India, which have translated into high prices.[Read More…]
It is fair to say that this essential principle of timebanking stands in stark contrast to the premises of the current money system and capitalist markets, which value everyone’s time and effort in highly unequal ways. Timebanking provides an alternative by helping people meet important personal and household needs in more socially satisfying, equal ways.
Alas education in civilization justifies and encourages ruthless greed. It seems that all vertebrates go through a learning process and all mammals need or do better with an education from their parents and siblings. However, people are completely dependent on human interaction to be able to participate in any social setting. That is we must learn from other people to[Read More…]
Financial speculation in food commodities has become one of the main drivers of food price volatility, with devastating impacts on small producers and the poor. Yet the disruptive influence of financial speculation on food markets is only a preview of future crises. International financial markets are now attempting to dominate many conventional markets as a long-term strategy to extract greater[Read More…]
The biggest problem with genetic engineering in agriculture is that it runs completely against the grain of sustainable agriculture. It separates the domain of science from the domain of farming community. It externalizes everything that was internal to the communities and formed the basis of sustainability: seeds, manure, pest control and more than anything, community knowledge of agriculture. Biotechnology in[Read More…]
Consider this. It is 1607. The English have been taking lands in Ireland for several centuries. First written down in the 7th century, Irish customary law is sophisticated and still administered by trained traditional magistrates (Brehons). Now rulings in the English courts on Gavelkind (1605) and Tanistry (1607) finally deny that customary law delivers property rights. Family holdings are made[Read More…]
The commons, a historical concept, has become an object of interest for the modern social sciences and the general public like few before it. It is well known that it became famous due to Garrett Hardin and his influential article, “The Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin 1968). Hardin had extrapolated from the historical phenomenon of the commons to identify principles[Read More…]
What would you have to think of if you want to build a liveable house? Maybe you would start looking at the environmental factors, an identifiable neighborhood, green areas nearby. You would look at the building site and choose to improve what’s there. You would create open space towards the south, and give it a distinct positive form. The[Read More…]
“Jens had to cultivate a strong, unified mind to counteract the disparate landscapes, societies, conditions. He jumped from a monthlong spring hunt to a helicopter that would take him to Nuuk to testify in front of Parliament. On behalf of the Hunters’ Council, he was working hard to ban the use of snowmobiles and prohibit fishing boats in Inglefield Sound,[Read More…]
Drive an hour northeast from Cusco, Peru, and you will encounter some beautiful high mountain lakes, historic Inca ruins, and the richest diversity of potatoes on the planet. Approximately 2,300 of the 4,000 known potato varieties in the world are grown here, making it one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. The 7,000 Quechua people who live on[Read More…]
Subsistence is the sum total of everything that humans need to survive: food and drink, protection from cold and heat, caring and company. If subsistence needs are met, life can continue (Mies/Bennholdt-Thomsen 1999). Many aspects of subsistence – goods and activities – have been transformed into commodities, but by far not all of them. After all, not only children, but[Read More…]
The devastating recession of 2008–09 and its volatile aftermath have focused everyone’s attention on the global economy. There is growing agreement that better policies, laws and institutions are needed, but will the next economy be fair and equal for all inhabitants of Earth? No one really knows. Yet one thing is certain: the political will to create a democratically restructured[Read More…]
This essay introduces the tragedy of the anticommons. What’s that? Let’s start with something familiar: a commons. When too many people share a single resource, we tend to overuse it – we may overfish the oceans and pollute the air. This wasteful overuse is a tragedy of the unmanaged commons. How do we solve such a tragedy? Often, by creating[Read More…]
Threading elements of the great educational experiments of Bauhaus and Roycroft Community models together with Pierre Levy’s modern definition of “collective intelligence,” La Scuola Open Source (The Open Source School) embodies the principles of the sharing movement. Its success hinges on cooperative work, co-design, shared skills, and an open source culture. The school’s 13 co-founders believe in the power of people’s[Read More…]
We can turn our attention to the question of what we want to do with our common resources. That is what really matters, for common goods exist only if we produce them – and they will remain only if we take care of them.
It’s fashionable these days to summon the concept of narrative for effecting change, whether it’s to evoke brand loyalty, to create demand for some product or, on a rather more substantive scale, to persuade humans to live more peaceably on the planet. I’d personally prefer to see its mysterious power deployed in pursuit of a lot more of the latter[Read More…]
When we talk about commons in Europe, the question usually arises whether public services are also to be considered commons. In order to answer this question, we must examine our understanding of the (social welfare) state on the one hand and the concept of the “public” on the other. FROM THE SOCIAL WELFARE STATE TO THE NEOLIBERAL COMPETITION STATE1 The[Read More…]
With the climate emergency now breaking upon the world, some may wonder whether human society is going to be capable of an effective response. It seems that our current toolkit is threefold. First there is the political dimension. The Green party is making substantial progress and other parties are lining up their own positions in regard to climate change. Second are the organisations, like the[Read More…]
Reproduction precedes social production. Touch the women, touch the rock. 1 – Peter Linebaugh At least since the Zapatistas took over the zócalo in San Cristobal de las Casas on December 31, 1993, to protest legislation dissolving the ejidal lands of Mexico, the concept of “the commons” has been gaining popularity.2 There are important reasons why this apparently archaic idea has[Read More…]
The commons are not concessions. They are resources that belong to the people as a matter of life necessity. Everybody has a right of an equal share of the commons and must be empowered by law to claim equal and direct access to it. Everybody has equal responsibility to the commons and shares a direct responsibility to transfer its wealth[Read More…]
The commons are as varied as life itself, and yet everyone involved with them shares common convictions. If we wish to understand these convictions, we must realize what commons mean in a practical sense, what their function is and always has been. That in turn includes that we concern ourselves with people. After all, commons or common goods are precisely[Read More…]
From a game-theoretic point of view, commons represent both a chance and a problem. Game-theory is a mathematical tool that allows us to analyze decision-making in situations with social interdependencies such as sports, where a team has to decide either to play defensively or offensively in a match against another team, or economic situations, where companies have to decide whether[Read More…]
Resilience: the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks. The UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, published by the UK government in 2010, was a bold and powerful statement of intent for a low-carbon economy in the UK (HMG 2009). It stated that by[Read More…]
In 2011, a community of farmers, designers, developers, engineers, architects, roboticists and open source thinkers came together in Boston, Massachusetts, to explore a simple yet radical idea – that great improvements in agriculture could be achieved by reducing barriers to knowledge exchange. They were convinced that transforming agricultural technology into a commons would result in a more adaptive, open and[Read More…]
A woman is writing a letter, and her pen drops to the floor. She leans across the desk and tries to pick it up, but she can’t reach it. A small boy realizes that he can help her. He walks over to the pen, picks it up and hands it to the woman. This is an experiment with twenty-month-old children.[Read More…]
One of the most interesting autonomous projects associated with the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) is Calafou, the self-proclaimed “post-capitalist colony” which settled in 2011 in the ruins of an abandoned industrial village in the Catalan county of l’Anoia, about 65km away from Barcelona. The colony was set up with the participation of several CIC members with the aim of becoming[Read More…]
Efficiency is the spiritual practice of the religion of scientific management. Under its spell, we have not only privatized once abundant shared natural resources, but we have also privatized our intellectual and cultural commons Chris Corrigan questions the mantra of market efficiency, offsetting it against commoning: This morning, I’m reading this article. It’s a review of two books charting the[Read More…]
One of the most important languages for expressing the values of the commons, I have come to realize, is art. It can often express visceral knowledge more effectively than words and give those insights a more powerful cultural reality. Those were my thoughts when I saw “Seeing Wetiko,” an “online gallery” of artworks, music and videos just released by the global arts[Read More…]
There is an all-enclosing commons-economy which has been successful for billions of years: the biosphere. Its ecology is the terrestrial household of energy, matter, beings, relationships and meanings which contains any manmade economy and only allows for it to exist. Sunlight, oxygen, drinking water, climate, soil and energy – the products and processes of this household – also nourish the[Read More…]
“The Pyrenees, they are not all that high up – their outlines are gently curved, sharp ridges few and far between, and all the peaks are rounded. It seems like music frozen in place in this high country” (Kurt Tucholsky, celebrated German journalist and author, 1927). We are standing on the Col de Peyreget, where a small sign says we[Read More…]
“If we say that money comes from ecological function instead from extraction, manufacturing buying and selling, then we have a system in which all human efforts go toward restoring, protecting and preserving ecological function. That is what we need to mitigate and adapt to climate change, to ensure food security, to ensure that human civilizations survive. Our monetary system must[Read More…]
What changes in state power must occur for commoning to flourish as a legal form of self-provisioning and governance? What does the success of the commons imply for the future of the state as a form of governance? My colleagues and I at the Commons Strategies Group puzzled over such questions last year and decided we needed to convene some[Read More…]
The Maharashtra government is back to its policy of privatizing open public spaces in Mumbai. Ordinary people are the losers because of this policy declared on July 27. . The upper class is not bothered because it has created its own spaces for recreation when it is not grabbing public space. I got a glimpse recently when I attended a[Read More…]
The Connecting the Dots series has convincingly shown a number of interconnected reasons why the global system is in crisis, and why there is no way out without a structural transformation of the dominant neoliberal system. In our contribution, we want to stress the key importance of what we call a “value regime,” or simply put, the rules that determine[Read More…]
Hilary Wainwright, of the Transnational Institute and co-editor of Red Pepper magazine, made a lasting impression on the Commons Transition/P2P Foundation team with her panel presentation at the recent Commons Collaborative Economies event in Barcelona. During her presentation, Wainwright shared her insights on the hidden commons of care. “Women have been creating a Commons for a long time: the domestic[Read More…]
A proverb of the indigenous people of southwestern Colombia warns: “The word without action is empty, action without the word is blind, and action and the word outside the spirit of the community is death.” Of course, many of us are on the quest to figure out precisely the opposite — how to integrate word, action and community, and thereby create flourishing commons that can unleash cascades of creativity, aliveness and innovation. That is precisely what we need right now.
Noam Chomsky on Why This Is the Most Dangerous Point in Human History 
HAK Birthdays: Henry Kissinger Turns 100 
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Our beloved K.P.Sasi is no more. Filmmaker, cartoonist, writer, mentor, friend and above all tireless activist championing the cause of every underdog, Sasi breathed his last, mid-afternoon this Christmas day – after battling a medical condition for months. I remember the last time I met him, almost exactly a month before he passed away, at the ayurvedic healing center in[Read More…]
