Building our common assets

What's your most valuable stuff? Not the house or car. It’s the things we share in common: gifts of nature, like air and water, and the sum of all human knowledge and experience, including science and culture. They form the basis of humanity’s common wealth, and without them we couldn’t breathe, drink, or create. We call them, collectively, "the commons."

Despite their importance, we've forgotten how to recognize the commons and act like the rightful owners of these riches. Our ancestors saw more clearly. The stewardship of our shared inheritance is embedded in our religious traditions, and laws about the commons date back to Roman times. Some early American states called themselves "Commonwealths" and made the government responsible to care for that common property for "generations yet to come."

But these days our commons are threatened as never before. Some are being run into the ground, and others are being swallowed up as private property. But if welook closely, our commons are
still there for us to claim and protect. Now's the time.

Think our wealth is made on Wall Street? Think again. Markets do a great job of putting dollars in our pockets. That's income. But much of the capital, the basis for our wealth, lies elsewhere: in the commons. When we log trees on our public lands, we are cashing in some of our naturalcapital. And when we utilize math theorems or chemical equations, we are drawing upon our human knowledge capital.

There are two principles for managing this portfolio of assets. The use of common property should benefit all owners. And our use must not diminish the value of our property for future generations. But the dollar value of our common assets is only part of the story. What price shall we place on a sunset? On community or democracy ? Each of these depends on our commons as well.It will take skill and sound judgment to bring the commons back under good management. In some cases, we can change the rules so that the market pulls in the same direction as the common good. In others, we need to reconsider whether we've let too much of our common property be "enclosed"for private use. If we manage the commons well, the payoff willbe prosperity for ourselves and for our children. It's just common sense.

Managing our sky as a common asset is the best way to reduce pollution. Look closely, our commons are still there for us to claim and protect. Now's the time.

We depend on the sky -- our air and atmosphere -- for services that few in the past could have imagined. The sky protects us from ultraviolet light, helps to regulate our climate, and much else.Unfortunately, it's mostly when pollution from Earth starts to foul up these systems that we begin to notice them. As problems accumulate, it's worth noting that the Western legal tradition as far back as Roman times declares the sky to be our common property. That makes air pollution nothing less than an infringement upon our property rights.

Ironically, the best way to protect our sky may be to rent out limited rights to pollute it. We're already trying something similar to control sulfur dioxide (SO2) -- a cause of acid rain. Here's how the rules work: Power plants obtain a permit for each ton of SO2 that they want to belch into our atmosphere. Each year we reduce the number of permits available, but since the power plants may swap them amongst themselves, those who cut their emissions most can profit by selling their permits to the more stubborn polluters. The result: anextremely efficient way of reducing acid rain. The only problem is that we launched the program by "grandfathering" the pollution -- giving away the initial permits. A study of similar programs by the think tank Resources for the Future shows
that selling the permits at auction would be twice as economical to society as handing them out. That's the bottom line. And after all, it's our sky.

Patents and copyrights ought to be used for growing our knowledge and culture.

Who owns the writings of Plato or the equations of Einstein? We all do. These strands in the tapestry of human learning are part of our "public domain." Countless generations have contributed, each building upon the efforts of thosewho have come before. It's no exaggeration to say that all of humanity's progress rests upon this knowledge base. Concerned that the public domain continue to grow, our nation's Founding Fathers instructed Congress "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" by offering short-term monopolies as rewards. These are the tools that we know as patents and copyrights. They offer financial incentives for inventors or creators to continue their work.

But these days, monopoly protections have gotten so far out of hand that they are interfering with our common goals. Patents have been extended to realms like DNA, where they are likely to hinder, not stimulate, progress. And the copyright term has been extended 11 times since 1960, from 28 to up to 95 years, "to such ludicrous proportions that it now often inhibits rather than promotes the circulation of ideas," writes The Economist. A roster of Nobel Prize-winning economists agrees. We need to reconsider recent patent and copyright madness to strike a better balance between the rights of creators and the public interest.

The value of our Internet stems from its open design.

Years ago, did you ever think you would plug a computer into the phone line? Until the 1960s, it would have been legally impossible -- AT&T had amonopoly on the lines and no one else could use them. What we've learned is that keeping our systems -- hardware like phone lines and software like computer code -- open to innovation is crucial. Take this example: hyperlinking between websites. It seems basic to us now, but it wasn't invented until years after the Internet itself. The norms of the Internet were wisely designed to allow people to connect easily with each other and to build freely on what had come before. As a

result, the Internet has become the modern town square, helping to bring about the greatest technological, and economic, revolution of recent times.

Today, however, threats to our open Internet commons abound. We take our Internet mobility for granted, but picture being steered by companies to one website over another. It would be like not being able to call Southwest for a reservation because your phone company had a deal with United. Just as in other media, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is looking to allow a greater concentration of corporate control. That might lead to a very different Internet from the open access commons we've come to know.
 

Public space furnishes the platform on which community and democracy flourish.

Public spaces have played a crucial role in American life since the days of the Revolution, when patriots gathered on Boston Common and militias drilled to greet the British.
These days, though, much of our world is enclosed as private spaces, with rules enforced by the owners of shopping malls, office parks, and gated communities. You can be banned from holding a rally, gathering signatures, or even handing out literature there. But public spaces, where people of all kinds interact, follow the laws of the Constitution: they are where we express our freedoms of speech and assembly.

And public spaces aren't just for politics. They are also the places -- the parks, the libraries, the sidewalks, the lightly trafficked streets -- where a community knits itself together. One example emerging in cities all around the nation is the rebuilding of vacant lots as community gardens, often on pieces of land that had been considered without value. The San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners operates gardening education classes and a transitional employment program. We need our public spaces.

The key to meeting our water challenge is to once again recognize water as a commons.

Picture this future: the supply of fresh water becomes so valuable that a large segment of the world's population simply can't afford it. In fact, the United Nations predicts that by 2025, nearly two -thirds of the world will face water shortages. Can something like water -- so vital to life itself -- be regarded as nothing more than a commodity? It wasn't always this way. Societies through the ages have considered water a resource to be shared, not to mention a blessing and a sacrament. But these days the World Trade Organization (WTO) and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are redefining water in commercial terms. One result is that a California company is suing Canada for its refusal to allow bulk exports of water -- a restriction that may not be permitted under the trade rules.

In the U.S., we are facing a water crunch as well. Half the population depends on underground aquifers, and for every five gallons we pump out, nature replaces only four. While honoring the history of water rights, we need to adapt to changing times. Markets for water transfers can be designed with social and ecological goals in mind. Our best guide is to recognize that water is, after all, a commons -- and to manage it as a "public trust," for the good of everyone.

Our airwaves can provide a bonanza of riches, if we will insist that they serve the public interest.

Our airwaves have been a valuable asset ever since the first radio station went on the air, early in the last century. Back then, we handed out licenses in exchange for promises that broadcasting serve "the public interest." There was only so much of the broadcast spectrum to go around, and we set public service as the price of using the public's airwaves. Today, much has changed, and although broadcasters have shirked their public service responsibilities, there is good news as well. The proliferation of wireless gadgets -- everything from global positioning systems (GPSs) to cell phones -- has made our airwaves more valuable than ever. And new technologies will allow us to maximize our use of the spectrum, freeing up new space for other channels.

This windfall of newly available spectrum has everyone scrambling. American broadcasters want to be "grandfathered" so they can sell it themselves. Not so fast, pardner. Estimates for the commercial value of the U.S. spectrum run as high as $770 billion. The government should auction some of that itself, and put the rest to other uses. One small piece of unlicensed spectrum is creating a boom in wireless computing called Wi-Fi. We need more space for that. And imagine an FM dial with a range of voices as diverse as our people. If we manage the spectrum as a public good, that's a real possibility.

Sections:

• What is the Commons?
• Key Functions of the Commons
• The Commons, the Market and the State
• Why the Commons matter now
• Principles of Commons management
• How much is it worth?

WHAT IS THE COMMONS?

By the law of nature these things are common to mankind — the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the shore of the sea.
        — Institutes of Justinian (535 A.D.)

In this report we use the terms commons, common assets, common property and common wealth. They all refer to the same thing in slightly different ways.

Commons is the generic term. It embraces all the creations of nature and society that we inherit jointly and freely, and hold in trust for future generations.

Common assets are those parts of the commons that have a value in the market. Radio airwaves are a common asset, as are timber and minerals on public lands. So, increasingly, are air and water.

Common property refers to a class of human-made rights that lies somewhere between private property and state property. Examples include conservation easements held by land trusts, Alaskans’ right to dividends from the Alaska Permanent Fund, and everyone’s right to waterfront access.

Common wealth refers to the monetary and non-monetary value of the commons in supporting life and well-being. Like stockholders’ equity in a corporation, it may increase or decrease from year to year depending on how well the commons is managed.

The commons itself is as old as the earth, and the concept of the commons goes back many hundreds of years.

The Romans distinguished between three types of property: res privatae, res publicae and res communes. The first consisted of things capable of being possessed by an individual or family. The second consisted of things built and set aside for public use by the state, such as public buildings and roads. The third consisted of natural things used by all, such as air, water and wild animals.

In the United Kingdom during the Middle Ages, the commons were shared lands used by villagers for foraging, hunting, planting crops and gathering wood. In 1215, the Magna Carta established forests and fisheries as res communes, resources available to all. (Prior to the Magna Carta, the king could grant or sell exclusive usage rights.)

In America, four early states — Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Kentucky — called themselves ‘commonwealths.’ Several states declared in their constitutions that natural resources belong to the people and that government acts as the people’s trustee.

KEY FUNCTIONS OF THE COMMONS

THE COMMONS, THE MARKET & THE STATE

WHY THE COMMONS MATTER NOW

Our old Manifest Destiny was to carve up the commons. Our new task is to rebuild it.

Both the idea and the reality of the commons have been declining since the 18th century. Why now, at the beginning of the 21st century, should we revive them?

The simple answer is that we have to.

Despite the many benefits it brings, the market is like a runaway steam engine. It has no internal governor to tell it when to stop depleting the commons that sustains it.

To put this another way, we’ve been living off common capital and we have to stop.

In the beginning, America was a vast commons. The original inhabitants lived off the commons and shared it with other species. They took what they needed and left the rest alone.

Then new settlers came. They filled the continent with cities, highways and shopping malls — more stuff than the earth had ever seen. They built a great multi-cultural nation. But as they did so, they turned forests into plywood, wetlands into parking lots, the atmosphere into a dump.

If our old Manifest Destiny was to carve up the commons, our new task is to rebuild it. We must do this to protect the planet, enhance our quality of life, reduce inequality and leave a better world for our children.

PRINCIPLES OF COMMONS MANAGEMENT

The fundamental rules for commons management are similar to those for private trusts.

The precautionary principle’s fundamental idea is that we prevent problems rather than clean them up afterward.

— Carolyn Raffensperger

As with private trusts, the goal of commons management is to preserve assets and share benefits. Hence, the basic principles of commons management are similar to those of private trusts.

Commons managers must, first and foremost, protect shared assets for the long term. They must also assure that the benefits flowing from the assets are widely shared.

Beyond these basic principles, specific rules for commons management vary from one commons to another. Broadly speaking, they depend on the level of use society wishes to allow or encourage.

If a commons needs to be off limits to all but the most non-invasive use — a wilderness area, for example — the guiding rule is, ‘No trespassing.’

If a commons has no inherent limits on use — like the Internet or the cultural commons — the guiding rule is, ‘The more the merrier.’ Use should be as free as possible, and management’s main job should be to minimize private toll booths.

If a commons can be used up to, but not beyond, some physical threshold — fisheries, aquifers and the atmosphere are examples — management’s job is to set and enforce sustainable use limits. In economic terms, its challenge is to live off income without diminishing capital.

In managing physically limited commons, it’s often desirable to cap total use and charge users a fee. Such caps and prices assure preservation, let markets sort out competing uses, and generate revenue for social and environmental needs.

Setting a total usage cap can be controversial. If the physical threshold is uncertain, a critical question is, “Which side should we err on?” Under the precautionary principle, if the potential harm from overuse is substantial (e.g. the polar ice caps could melt), the cap should be set with safety as the guide.

The process of protecting and sustaining a commons involves several steps. The asset must first be identified and given a legal and/or institutional structure. In some cases, usage caps and new kinds of property rights may be necessary. It may also be necessary to appoint trustees and acquire pre-existing property rights.

Once a commons is protected and and given a proper management regime, markets can come into play.

HOW MUCH IS IT WORTH?

The assets we share are worth more than the assets we own privately.

It’s impossible to give an exact answer. Many of our shared inheritances are simply beyond pricing. Others are potentially quantifiable, but there’s no current market for them.

Nevertheless, based on numerous studies, it’s possible to get an order of magnitude. It turns out that the assets we share are worth trillions of dollars — more in fact than the assets we own privately.

Which raises an obvious question: why is so much attention paid to the management of private wealth, and so little to the management of common wealth?

One answer is that it’s easier to study things that can be measured precisely. Another is that we have a direct personal interest in private wealth. But the main reason is that economists don’t think the commons is important. That belief must change.

THE VALUE OF SKY

The sky does a lot of valuable things for us. It shields us from asteroids and ultra-violet rays, regulates the earth’s temperature, replenishes our fresh water and delivers oxygen to our lungs and machines. Such services are worth a lot of money.

Exactly how much is, of course, impossible to say. And it’s important to distinguish between the sky’s intrinsic value, which is truly beyond knowing, and its exchange value, which is what markets understand.

In our calculations we use the estimated exchange value of just one vital sky service, carbon dioxide absorption. This represents real income that could be earned from the sale of carbon emission permits.

According to recent government studies, this could range up to $400 billion annually, depending on many variables. This means the value of the sky as an income producing asset easily exceeds $1 trillion.

The long-term historical development of commons as a source of inspiration for research and policy

Tine DeMoor

Research Institute for History and Culture University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. 

Managing co-editor, International Journal of the Commons

Many negative effects of human use of resources do not become visible until after lengthy periods of time, often even centuries. One could assume it therefore to be obvious to integrate long-term historical developments into case-studies on common pool resources, in particular when we’re trying to understand how the regulation of the use of common pool resources worked and what changes of that regulation could bring about. However, whenever a historical perspective is integrated in the commons studies this is mostly restricted to the 19th century. The distant past seems to be - for many commons-researchers- another country. At the same time historians, tending to be rather descriptive and often hardly inter- ested in the theoretical implications of their research, hardly search to benefit from the models and frameworks repetitively tested by sociolo- gists, economists, and others. This is a missed opportunity. After all, in the period we can study because of sufficient inheritance of written documents (from the 10th century onwards), the homo sapiens did not change to such an extent that we couldn’t compare his behaviour over long periods of time. Seen from a world history perspective, whether this homo sapiens be- haved as an economicus or reciprocans is more a matter of circumstances –ecological, economic, social, cultural- than of human biology or evolution. I believe that part of the limited mutual interest between historians and other social scientists is due to the rather negative and static view of the pre-1800 village common that was created in the 1960s. In this short article I will try to start correcting that image. Europe, being the area of the world with the most extensively studied history of the commons –from common arable to common woodland- will hereby play an exemplary role in this, but other regions could be at least as interesting to test the possi- bilities of cooperation between disciplines.

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Over time, and in particular since the middle of the twentieth century, the term ‘commons’ has been used in many ways. Previously, in the historical documents ‘commons’ referred to common land, often in the form of pasture, or meadowland. Commons in the historical sense refer to land that was used and managed by several people or households during a certain period, in distinction to land that was used by only one person or household throughout the whole year. The variety of alternative namings in English (e.g., open field, common meadow, common waste) and in other languages (markegenootschappen, meenten (Dutch), Genossenschaften (German) to give just a few ex- amples) has over time led to considerable confusion and has for a long time prevented scientific comparison of the emergence and functioning of commons. In the middle of the twentieth century, the common as a physical phenomenon started to be used repeatedly by scientists from other disciplines to indicate collective property. Though he was not the first to ‘conceptualise’ the historical commons, Hardin’s ‘the tragedy of the commons’ can be considered as a bench mark in the evolution of the discourse on the commons.

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Hardin caused considerable confusion by giving a false account of the historical functioning of the commons. The “common” Hardin described was land whereupon no property rights rested, thus making it very easy for everyone to overuse it. He asks the reader to ‘Picture a pasture open to all’. And then: ‘It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons.’ However, the historical common was not at all open to all. On the contrary: all the commons had clear rules about the conditions to become a legitimate user, and on the do’s and don’ts if you had obtained membership. The European villagers started from the early 12th century onwards to formalise their cooperation in land usage and management by writing down regulations. These regulations were often highly sophisticated in their design, showing the awareness of the commoners in the dangers that lured in cooperation. They, for example, often used graduated sanctioning systems, not sparing those who didn’t report freeriding either. In trying to prevent the commoners being seduced by the market, it was often prohibited to put cattle on the com- mon summer pasture that had been bought on the early spring cattle market. The common was not a place to fatten up your cattle but it was an essential part of the mixed agricultural system as the manure produced by the cattle was indispensable for the arable land. This connection between the arable land and the common was vital for the pre-industrial agricultural system. As has been shown for several Western European countries the regulations of the European commons matched Lin Ostrom’s famous design principles pretty well. When putting these rules into practice, the commoners showed an often remarkable ability to guard the ecological bal- ance on their common and to adjust to changing social and economic circumstances. In plenty of occasions the number of cattle allowed on the common was restricted to the carrying capacity of the pasture, and if this number was not set in advance, the number of cattle could be regulated by using price mechanisms. Plenty of other examples of rules and practice could show that in their strive for a striking a balance between efficiency and utility the commoners autonomously designed an impressive set of rules they put adequately into practice. This allowed them to keep the ‘tragedy’ well at a distance.

♦

Topics other than natural resources have emerged since the 1990s in the commons debate. Here again, inspira- tion can be found in a long-term perspective as in the same period of the emergence of commons we also find a sort of knowledge common emerging. Craft and merchant guilds –which Putnam considered to be pivotal in the development of democracy in Northern Italy (Putnam et al. 2003)- were set up to exchange and safeguard knowl- edge about trade, products and production processes. History here confirms what we find in the experimental anthropological research, that market integration can encourage cooperation, as was also recently shown by amongst others Herbert Gintis and Samuel Bowles. The emergence of commons and guilds happened in a period of increasing market integration: in some regions of Western Europe as much as 60% of the population had been active on the labour market, already during the late middle ages. At the same time historical analysis also suggests other factors that might have played a role in the population’s willingness to cooperate. There are juridical (for example the creation of the concept of universitas) and social factors (the particular marriage/ family pattern of Western Europe) that also may have plaid a fundamental role in changing the face of the history of cooperation. The evolution of cooperation over a mere 1000 years in Europe suggests a multitude of new paths of analysis for sociological and anthropo- logical studies of present day commons.

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In the future, we –as commons-researchers from various disciplines- should try to close the interdiscipli- nary gap. Historians have for a long time primarily focussed on the dissolution of the commons, whereby external factors like industrialisation and population growth were considered as the motors of this process. In these stories, the commoners themselves usually play a passive role and are approached as a group, without much attention for the potential influence of the com- moners as individuals. Among 19th century commons- historians, there was also a clear interest for the origins of the commons, but here again the individual motiva- tions to own and use land collectively were largely ignored. And moreover, those motivations, whether individual or group-directed, were in the historical debate not linked to the causes for the dissolution of the commons. More attention should go to what lays in between origin (in Europe, mainly 11-13th century) and dissolution (in Europe, mainly 18th-19th century): the functioning of the commons, which has been one of the prime concerns of the other social scientists. Social scientists have used concepts as the prisoner’s di- lemma, free riding, and reciprocity to identify problem- atic relationships between individual aspirations and group dynamics, and have put less stress on external factors as causes for the malfunctioning or even dissolu- tion of a common. Sociologists and economists gener- ally put the main responsibility for the dissolution of the commons with the individual. This divergence in re- search traditions shouldn’t be a hindrance for more interdisciplinary commons research in the future. The sociological debate on individual responsibility of the commoners can be enriched by linking it to the influ- ence of external factors, which has been at the fore of historians describing the dissolution of the commons and vice versa. A solution to identify the links between the different aspects as discussed by commons-re- searchers, could be the use of an analytical framework that focuses on the main functions of a common, and the interaction between these functions: the common as a resource, as an institution and as a property regime.

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The longevity of many commons (several centuries) should be recognised as a sign for institutional flexibility. Adapting to change and the passing on of values and norms over hundreds of years is not easily done -but, as see in many commons- it can be done. Including the commons of the past would add abundant diachronical evidence of what is now primarily based on contempo- rary case studies. One of the difficulties of experimental research has long been the difficulty to repeat situations –over several generations- and to take into account reputational mechanisms. Notwithstanding the problem- atic aspects of historical research (e.g., the lack of oral sources), there is often sufficient written material left to analyse the behaviour of generations of commoners. And we can discover the pitfalls: where the self-governance of the commons was threatened, a tragedy could often not be avoided, as in contemporary examples. This information could help us understand and predict what happens on commons in villages in third-world countries that are facing levels of e.g. market integration similar to the villages in the European past. That past is not an- other country; they didn’t do things all that much differ- ently there. On the contrary.

For Further Reading :

• Bowles, S. 2004. Foundations of Human Sociality. Economic experiments and ethnographic evidence from fifteen small-scale societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• De Moor, Martina, Leigh Shaw-Taylor, and Paul Warde, eds. 2002. The management of common land in north west Europe, c.1500-1850. CORN Publication Series, 8. Turnhout : Brepols.
• De Moor, Tine. 2007. Avoiding tragedies. A Flemish common and its commoners under the pressure of social and economic change during the eighteenth century. Economic History Review.
• Putnam, Robert D. 1993. Making democracy work. Civic traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Vivier, Nadine, and Marie-Danielle Demalas. 2003. Les propriétés collectives face aux attaques libérales (1750-1914). Europe occidentale et Amérique  latine. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

Like the tide, the commons ebbs and flows over time.

In our time, it's rising again.

Sections:

• There Is an Alternative, and Its Rising - CURRENT PAGE
• Protecting Nature's Gifts
• Building the Hometown Commons
• Sharing Knowledge and Culture
• Assuring Security for All
• Reclaiming Our Time and Quiet 

Sections

• Introduction
• The Enclosure of the Commons
• The Commons as a Sector of Value-Creation
• Reinventing the Commons
• The Commons as a New Narrative and Worldview

   By David Bollier 

One of the most stubborn problems in confronting the pathologies of the neoliberal political order is the limitations of our language. We do not have an adequate public vocabulary to describe the plunder of globalized markets. We have trouble highlighting the social inequities that are built into conventional econom ics and political discourse. We do not have a grand narrative with compelling sub-plots to set forth an alternative vision, one that can both stir the blood and show intellectual sophistication.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is a brave, decentralized movement on the march that is addressing these problems with ingenuity and patience. The focus of this movement is the commons.

The commons is still an embryonic vision. It will require time to evolve. But it is a vision with great potential, perhaps because it is not being advanced by an intellectual elite or a political party, but by a hardy band of resourceful irregulars on the periphery of conventional politics. (That’s always where the most interesting new things originate.)
These commoners are now starting to find each other, a convergence that augurs great things.

To be a bit more concrete: This proto-commons movement consists of environmentalists trying to protect wilderness areas and win fair compensation for the corporate use of public lands. It includes local communities trying to prevent multinational water companies from privatizing public water works and converting groundwater into over- priced, branded bottles of water.

The commoners are the hackers and corporate programmers who are building GNU Linux and thousands of other free software and open source computer programs. They
don’t want proprietary vendors to be able to charge them monopoly prices for inferior products, unnecessary upgrades and technical incompatibilities.

The commoners are artists, musicians, bloggers and scientists who use Creative Commons licenses to enable the legal sharing and re-use of their works on the Internet. These “free culture” advocates have adapted the CC licenses to the legal systems of nearly forty nations, with another thirty in the works. This network, in turn has given rise to a new international organization, iCommons, to promote the sharing economy of digital works.

The commoners are scientists building shared databases of research, and researchers trying to prevent corporations from patenting basic biomedical knowledge. There are thousands of academics who are bypassing commercial journal publishers and starting their own “open access” journals so that articles can be free in perpetuity via the Internet.

The commoners are farmers, especially in developing nations, who are trying to prevent biotech companies from replacing common crops with genetically modified, proprietary crops whose seed cannot be shared and whose ecological effects are troubling.

Ordinary citizens are rallying to defend the commons of public space by fighting intrusive commercialism in civic spaces, sports, public schools and personal spaces. Local communities are fighting “big box” retailers like Wal-Mart that are threatening independent businesses and Main Street culture.

What unites these various groups of people is their sense of the commons as a way to describe shared resources that are now being stolen by large corporations or imperiled by unchecked market activity. Put another way, the commons is a generic term for describing all those things that we inherit from nature and civil society, which we are duty-bound to pass along, undiminished, to future generations.

Don’t go looking for a definitive inventory of the commons. A commons arises whenever a given community decides that it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with a special regard for equitable access, use and sustainability. It is a social form that has long lived in the shadows of our market culture, but which is now on the rise.

The Enclosure of the Commons

“The commons” is a useful term because it helps begin to describe a nearly ubiquitous pathology of modern life, the enclosure of the commons. Governments throughout the world are conspiring with, or acquiescing in, the market plunder of our common wealth. This is the net effect of globalization and the neoliberal agenda.

Companies are taking valuable resources from the commons – spectrum , natural resources, deep-sea minerals, genetic code, public lands, and much more – and privatizing them . Once the cash value has been harvested from the commons, corporations tend to dump their wastes and social disruptions (primly known as “market externalities”) back into the commons, whereupon they declare to government and the commoners, “It's your problem ”.

The dynamics of enclosure are well known to British history. The landed gentry of the 18th and 19th centuries decided they could profit quite handsomely by seizing huge tracts of meadows, orchards, forests and other land that by custom were freely accessible to the commoners. With enclosure, resources that had historically been managed socially, through both formal and informal rules, were privatized and turned into commodities to be sold in the marketplace. There were gains in efficiency and innovation, to be sure – as well as the amassing of great private fortunes – but there was also massive disenfranchisement, ecological harm , poverty and suffering.

Enclosure means that people have to start paying for resources they previously got for free, or cheaply. It means that people need to ask for permission to use something that was previously theirs by right. Imagine a world of franchise bookstores, but no local libraries; of mega-shopping malls but no town squares; of private toll roads but no open highways.

Enclosure shifts ownership and control of a resource from a given community or the public at large, to private companies. This, in turn, changes the management and character of the resource, because a market has very different standards of accountability and transparency than a commons. It dictates a different set of social relationships in our dealings with each other and a given resource. Enclosure turns us into a mass of pay-per-use consumers in search of bargains and amusements; it makes it harder for us to become a citizenry with passionate commitments to something larger than our individual satisfactions, or even something collectively necessary (like dealing with global warming).

The Commons as a Sector of Value-Creation

Economists and politicians have long assumed that there are really only two sectors for governing things and “adding value” — the state and the market. Markets are seen as the vehicle for economic progress while government is supposed to take care of everything else. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that there is another sector – the commons – that is at least as important to our lives and well-being.

A great many commons contribute value to our lives every bit as much as the market. The gifts of nature – “ecosystem services,” in the eyes of some economists – are fantastically productive. Civic institutions like libraries, roadways and the BBC produce value in ways that the market cannot.

The commons is not, however, simply another term for socialism or communism . Both of those systems of governance rely upon state ownership and centralized bureaucracies to manage the people’s resources, a scheme that may or may not work out so well. The commons has no quarrel with government per se. Indeeed, the commons would be in much better shape if it enjoyed half the government support that the “free market” enjoys, in the form of subsidies, protective regulations, government services and the legal system .

But the commons is not the same as government because, in its ideal form , it is about the commoners owning and managing resources as directly and locally as possible. It usually entails a significant measure of participation, transparency, decentralized control and accountability – factors that are not always present when the state is managing a resource.

It is also important to note that while the commons shares many values with traditional liberalism , particularly on matters of democratic process and social concerns, the commons has a different moral footing. Liberalism is often accused of “intervening” in the marketplace to re-distribute wealth, a role that conservatives regard as a “confiscatory” taking of their private property. This has been a heavy political burden for progressives to displace, especially as the neoliberal political order has become more entrenched.

The commons reverses this moral narrative about “redistribution-as-theft” by pointing out that markets routinely take from , and frequently despoil, the commons. The investor class enjoys many direct and indirect subsidies – cheap use of public lands, airwaves and civic infrastructure; copyright and patent monopolies; research and services to support commerce; public education; etc. In addition, companies are accustomed to making the government and commoners pay for their costly externalities – pollution, safety and health risks, illegal behaviors, community disruptions.

Commoners are merely seeking to own and control something that belongs to them in the first place. They are seeking a pre-distribution of benefits from their own equity assets and socially created value, rather than a re-distribution of wealth generated by markets.

This is a new grand narrative upon which we can build a politics of access, sharing, equality and social well-being. The Internet offers many rich examples of collaborating and sharing, from open source software to Wikipedia to digital archives. The commons narrative can also begin to assert – with greater systematic rigor than liberalism can manage – the need for proper limits on market activity. It can also propose new institutional forms, such as the stakeholder trust, to generate new streams of non-wage income for citizens by monetizing common assets, where appropriate.

Let’s consider a timely example – Who owns the sky? My colleague Peter Barnes, in a book whose title asks that question, points out that industrial polluters presume that they own the sky, and that their rights to pollute ought to be “grandfathered” into any future schemes to limit carbon emissions, a key source of global warming.

From the perspective of the commons, this is absurd. Morally, we all “own” the sky and ought to have roughly equal benefit from it. Why should any corporation or industry have a pre-emptive right to use the limited capacity of the atmosphere as a waste dump?

Peter Barnes’ Sky Trust proposal offers an equitable commons solution: Auction the right to emit carbon into the sky, and place the funds into a trust owned by every citizen. That trust fund can then be managed by publicly appointed trustees, with the utmost transparency and fiduciary responsibility, to yield dividends for every citizen. The dividends will help offset the higher prices that citizens will inevitably have to pay for carbon-based products and services (a result of the pollution-rights auction). But the monies deposited into the Sky Trust will generate a much-needed stream of non-wage income for all citizens, helping to reduce inequality.

The means for securing and managing the commons will naturally vary with the resource and commons. But the point in all cases is to enable the commoners to reap value from their commons, whether it is in the form of cash revenues or inalienable usage rights. Investors demand no less from their equity assets. Surely this principle ought to hold for the commoners and their assets.

Reinventing the Commons

The commons is something very new and quite ancient. Its newness can be seen in the huge variety of commons proliferating on the Internet: free software and open source software, Wikipedia, remix music, mashup videos, peer-to-peer file sharing, open science initiatives, the open access movement in scholarly publishing, social networking software, and on and on. The Internet that hosts this explosion of digital commons is itself a commons of open, shared technical protocols.

Yet as novel as these developments are, the commons is as old as the human species. The citizens of Great Britain know this history. The commons has always been rooted in communities of social trust and cooperation. It is a place that honors custom , history and the local. Evolutionary biologists, neurologists and geneticists are now confirming just how deep the commons is inscribed in our being. The impulse to cooperate and share; to manage resources as a community and punish free-riders; and to assert a community ethic as a gyroscope of social stability – there propensities are arguably hard-wired into the human species as the basis for our evolutionary success.

The real aberration in human history is the vision of humanity set forth by neoclassical economics. Homo economicus defines human beings as rational, a historical individuals who invariably seek to maximize their material utility through market exchange. It also asserts, astonishingly, that all of society should be organized around this vision. This fragile, unsustainable fiction is now being unmasked — by free software, by online communities, by the people of developing countries, by the workings of nature itself.

Competitive market individualism has many virtues, and can be a potent ethic for innovation and enterprise. But only economists and ideologues dare to presume that market individualism has no limits or that “there is no such thing as society,” as Margaret Thatcher brazenly asserted. The commons exists. Its sovereign needs cannot be simply dismissed by the market or the state.

There is a more affirmative way of stating this truth: the commons is hugely generative in its own right. It is a value-creating sector that rivals the marketplace, and therefore deserves protection. “Cooperative individualism ” of the sort seen on the Internet can be far more innovative, productive and socially satisfying than the market. Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler has famously called this sector “commons-based peer production.” By this, he means a system of production that is “radically decentralized, collaborative and nonproprietary; based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or managerial commands.”

Even business is coming to realize the “power of us,” according to a Business Week cover story on corporate uses of mass collaboration for research, technology development and marketing. Forbes has profiled the “sharing economy” now arising on the Internet, and tech com panies talk about the efficiencies of “decentralized co-creation of value” – i.e., the commons. The U.S. Government’s many intelligence agencies have even created their own wiki – “Intellipedia” – to help its dispersed m inions efficiently share and sort their many fragments of distributed knowledge.

In the networked environm ent – which is increasingly the m atrix for organizing modern life – the commons is becoming an im portant new paradigm of production. In 2004, when I did a Google search on the word “commons,” it returned about eight million Web links. In October 2007, when I did the same search, 190 million links popped up. This is an admittedly crude bit of evidence for the growing appeal of the commons, but I believe it points to a profound transformation that is at once political, cultural and economic.

Look closely, just below the radar of mainstream media, and you will see a messy, uncoordinated, bottom -up movement in the throes of inventing itself. A teeming constellation of Internet users, environmentalists, librarians, academics, media reformers, software programmers, local currency fans, community gardeners, Slow Food aficionados, indigenous peoples, and others, are beginning to see the practical political value of the commons paradigm. The commons helps them express their personal and m oral connections to an endangered resource. It offers a positive vision and not just a reactive critique. It captures the moral high ground. Disparate battles against enclosure can be seen as related commons struggles. The com m ons invites people to participate, and to develop a sense of personal responsibility and initiative associated with ownership.

The Commons as a New Narrative and Worldview

For all of these reasons, I believe the commons can play a profound re-ordering role of cultural and political issues, much as the meta-language of “the environment” did in the 1960s. It is helpful to recall that “the environment” is a cultural invention. The air, water, soil and wildlife had always been there, of course. But they were not conceptualized in a coherent, unified way until Rachel Carson and others began to popularize the idea of “the environment.”

Duke Law School professor James Boyle has pointed out that bird watchers didn’t realize they might have something in common with bird hunters until “the environment” helped clarify their shared interests in protecting it. Once the idea of the environment took root, people could begin to make mental connections am ong diverse phenomena that had previously seem ed unconnected. It turned out that dying birds were linked to household chemicals, and genetic mutations in hum ans were linked to industrial pollution.

The language of the environ ent not only gave us an overarching narrative, it helped galvanize a political movement by providing a new, accessible story. The vision, the constituencies, the science, the politics and the cultural worldview were not born whole. They all evolved together, interactively, over time. No one knew all the answers in advance. The way forward was an improvisational act of faith. Environmentalism enacted a politics of yearning and hope.

Our times do not require another bold policy crusade or “messaging strategy.” We need to expand our very sense of “politics.” We need to cultivate a profoundly different orientation toward our challenges – a worldview that can integrate the personal, the social and the political in new ways.

For starters, we must learn how to talk about market failure and excesses more systematically without lapsing into a facile anti-corporatism . We must offer some positive alternatives, including ones that harness the m arket in constructive ways, while protecting the value-creating capacities of the commons. The Internet is demonstrating the lim its of centralized expertise and control, and the under-leveraged power of distributed intelligence. One lesson: people must have the room to participate and develop their own innovative, decentralized grassroots solutions.

Reinventing the commons is still a fledgling vision, but its spontaneous embrace by so m any different constituencies suggests a deep human yearning to explore new modes of social connection and collaboration. It suggests a desire to assert a human solidarity and authenticity in the face of an intrusive, gaudy commercial culture. It suggests a desire to reaffirm the local and defend natural ecosystems in the face of a market juggernaut intent on monetizing everything in its path.

The denizens of mainstream politics may be forgiven for not recognizing the commons. It has been culturally invisible for a long time. Its wealth cannot be easily quantified. It has not been named, classified and extensively studied. Not surprisingly, the commons has not been taken seriously in public policy deliberations.

Yet the crises of the commons are becoming more evident day by day as global warm ing, depleted fisheries, expansive copyright claims, social dysfunction and other symptoms of market excess continue unchecked.

It will not be easy to build a new political and policy tradition of the commons while we are deeply enmeshed in a neoliberal political culture and a market-influenced consciousness. Many intellectual paradoxes and discontinuities are likely. Any quest for ideological purity will fail. Which is why I believe that any commons movement must exhibit a tolerant, ecumenical humanism . We are all irregular, self-contradictory creatures. Any political growth will require im provisation and learning. Fortunately, the commons is more of a template or scaffolding for building out a new politics, not a rigid ideology or fundam entalism .

In the end, any real movement will depend upon how badly people really want to reclaim our com mon wealth, re-connect with each other as human beings, and devise new political and legal structures for achieving this vision. My guess? The energy and desire are there, but diffuse. The vision is gaining currency. An inventory of commons-based solutions is growing. Diverse types of commoners are starting to discover each other. What’s needed is a surge of new leadership and resources to take the com m ons to its next, more interesting stage of development.

1. A commons in Italy:  http://www.bollier.org/mayor-naples-champions-commons

2. Commons in India/Rajasthan:   http://www.bollier.org/rural-commons-india

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-01-19/rajasthans-cutting-edge-public-policies-promote-land-commons

3. Building commons in US around the Great Lakes http://onthecommons.org/work/commons-network/great-lakes-commons

    A shared and open map that dares to re-orient ourselves to the Great Lakes bio-region:     http://www.greatlakescommonsmap.org/

4. OWS Making Worlds workshops Febr. 2012:

http://makingworlds.wikispaces.com/Workshops

5. Key elements of a Social Charter for commons activists, by Kevin Hansen:

http://pierreterre.com/blog/key-elements-social-charter-give-legitimacy-commons-focused-activism

6. Registers for commons in UK: there must be a register for common land held by every county council or London borough: 

http://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/environment/countrysideandrights/public/common+village/Commons+Register.htm

7. Commons in South Africa:  Has brilliant practical messages for building commons, for communities, NGO’s and policymakers.

http://cordis.europa.eu/search/index.cfm?fuseaction=result.document&RS_LANG=IT&RS_RCN=12662473&q=

The specific objectives of CROSCOG were to create a network of researchers and practitioners on commons governance that reaches across the boundaries of particular resources and eco-systems. It was also to identify and share lessons from recent research about encouraging positive conservation practices across large areas and management multiple-use commons with a comprehensive eco-system based approach. CROSCOG aimed to share these lessons with a broad audience including the global scientific community, policymakers in Southern Africa, and local communities in Southern Africa through specific, targeted outreach efforts. 

Messages to communities 

1. Commons are life: You know how important the commons are to your livelihoods. Be strong and active in defending your commons and promoting ways to use and manage them sustainably to benefit local people. 
2. You can take the lead: Communities do not always have to be the passive recipients or objects of outside policies, programmes and interventions. It is possible for communities to take the initiative towards outside authorities, pushing their own ideas and agendas without always needing to be in reactive mode. Build collaborative platforms and coalitions between communities to represent your interests to outside authorities. Negotiate strongly with the state and the private sector when the acquisition or use of your resources is proposed - protect your interests! Seek advice and support from NGOs or other facilitators to strengthen your positions. 
3. Your science is valid: Rural people have valuable environmental knowledge that deserves as much respect as the knowledge of outside scientists. Treasure and build on the environmental science in your community. Seek ways to apply it and to merge it with outside science. 
4. Build on the strengths of your local institutions: Look for strengths in your existing local institutions for the management of natural resources - including your customary law - and advocate the roles of these local institutions where these can make an equitable and effective contribution to sustainable land use and livelihoods. 
5. Seek ways to use the opportunities provided by local government: Learn the strengths and weaknesses of your local government systems. For example, it may be possible to enact district council bylaws that will help you to govern your natural resources. Exploit whatever opportunities existing legislation and institutional structures may offer you. 

Messages to NGOs

The governance of the commons can succeed in southern Africa. There are many cases of successful governance of the southern African commons: programmes, projects and strategies that have benefited rural people in an environmentally sustainable way. Learn all you can about these successes, and help communities to learn about them too. 

1.    Co-learning with communities: Be ready to learn from and with communities, seeking insights into their systems of environmental knowledge, customary law and governance. Work with communities to build space for adaptive learning and management, deepening local scientific knowledge and building management systems that do not automatically depend only on exogenous science. 

2.    Create space for dialogue: Seek ways to create space and platforms for dialogue between stakeholders and interest groups within communities so as to build consensus and strengthen community positions for negotiation with outside authorities. 

3.    Help build coalitions: Communities can take the lead, but need support in building dialogue, coalitions and joint platforms to formulate and promote their interests and strategies towards outside agencies. They can be more effective when they scale up horisontally and take strong joint positions. 

4.    Avoid multiplication of local institutions: Communities suffer when each agency or project invents a new committee for forestry, conservation, water, wildlife or whatever. Work through existing structures whenever feasible and appropriate. 

5.    Help build community initiatives and authority: Respect community level institutions and initiatives. Help them build their political power in the natural resource management arena, to strengthen their profile vis-a-vis external authorities. This has economic and operational advantages: community resource management is often cheaper and better respected than the enforcement of statute law by outside agencies. Customary law may still have a significant role to play in this regard. 

6.    Ensure community benefits: Ensure that all conservation initiatives generate tangible benefits for local people and that these outweigh the costs that they impose on the community. Help them appraise proposals for commoditisation of their commons critically and to resist interventions that threaten their livelihoods. Develop NGO skills to support communities in negotiating hard deals with the state and the private sector that assure and promote community interests. 

7.    Seek profound simplicity and apply those insights: Avoid overly theoretical or scientific approaches. Do not automatically use templates for community consultation and involvement. Take time to learn and appreciate the profound realities and to express their operational implications in simple and practicable terms. 

8.    The power of maps: Help communities to counter outside constructions and mappings of their realities: use new technologies to help integrate and combine their spatial and environmental perceptions into larger scale maps of resources and management priorities. 

Messages to policymakers  

The commons are ecological systems that are critical for livelihoods: Most ecological systems are commons and shaped by human use that must be managed. This is true from local fisheries and grasslands to global commons such as the atmosphere. Commons play a critical role in livelihoods and ecological systems even at relatively higher scales. For example, forest commons on the local level make an important contribution to solving problems of climate change that are themselves a global-scale commons. Commons need protection and the state alone cannot provide this protection. This requires local involvement (meeting basic needs and promoting fair access to resources through effective policies). 

1.    The government's responsibility in enabling local involvement: Community structures need to be legally empowered instead of repeating the all too frequent tendency to criminalise livelihoods through micro-management of the commons. Policymakers need to reinforce the critical role played by local communities and customary practices because they reflect the community's various moral, social, political, and economic incentives that drive human behaviour. Government achieves its objectives when problems are solved by local communities. The role that government must play is ensuring that these processes are transparent, fair and legitimate. 

2.    Scaling up existing practices is a key to sustainable commons: Large scale and complex commons can in fact be managed when local people are involved. Governments should start with what they find on the ground. Some actions tear commons down while others preserve and sustain them; it is these latter actions, these practices of sustainable commons management, which must be replicated to meet the challenge of large scale and complex commons. 

Section 2: Dissemination of Knowledge 

The messages identified above have been and are being directed to specific audiences including community members, policy makers, and NGO working in sustainable development. The most important dissemination activity was the Policy Event in Cape Town which was attended by policy people as well as scholars from across Southern African and with some representation from Eastern Africa and Europe. The community and NGO messages are being distributed through a community information sheet and by radio broadcasts that have taken place in Zambia and Botswana. The NGO and policymaker messages have been published as one of the well-known PLAAS policy brief series and have been disseminated through that organisation's policy network. 

Section 3: Publishable Results 

CROSCOG has produced and submitted a total of 23 scholarly papers. These included two overall theme papers that pulled together information from all cases. It also included three cross-case comparisons on special themes: tourism, redressing historical discrimination in pelagic fisheries, and fisheries co-management. The remainder of the papers described lessons coming from specific cases of commons management. 

For more examples see also http://www.schoolofcommoning.com/content/health-commons-resources

8. Open Commons Region Linz    http://www.linz.at/leben/opencommonsregion.asp

Beyond the Market State

There are two operating systems involved in the provision and allocation of goods and services in modern society. Each has familiar roots in history. Adam Smithʼs legacy is that the self-interest of individual producers and consumers competing through the market automatically maximizes their welfare and that of everyone else. The legacy of Thomas Hobbes is that the self-interest of individuals who maximize their own welfare inevitably leads to social chaos and conflict, requiring state authority and the legal use of coercion. Since the Industrial Revolution, these seemingly divergent philosophies have fused into a single center of authority -- the Market State -- with the market responsible for economic productivity and the state for social control. Unlike decentralized systems which lead to disorder, inefficiency and waste, this monocentric order is said to optimize efficiency through centralization and the division of labor. Yet there is much evidence to the contrary. Modern markets and sovereign states are highly inefficient in providing and allocating resources simultaneously at different levels of human need and demand. By suppressing cross-scale linkages of common goods and profiting from mismatches in scale, the worldʼs hierarchical distribution structures prevent individuals from sustaining long-term productive use of their own resources.

The Market State cannot effectively provide goods and services to meet the needs of people for two reasons. First, through its bureaucratic rules and institutions, the Market State separates resource producers and providers from resource users, resulting in a division between individuals and groups which produce goods and services and those who consume them. When goods and services are not produced and consumed by the same people, they degenerate into meaningless commodities with negligible value. Second, by focusing mainly on aggregate data in their decisions on resources, modern markets and public administration exclude the intrinsic value of human and ecological well-being. When the primary source of human meaning is mediated by prices, commodities and private property, individuals are cut off from the natural wealth of their local/regional ecosystems and global commons; the social wealth of families, voluntary associations and communities; and the ideas, beliefs and cultural practices of others.

Co-Production

Presently, the market creates value by enclosing a common area with fences or borders (to extract its resources for production and deposit the ensuing waste), while the state defends this privatized property through its monopoly powers of enforcement. Yet there are a variety of institutional domains that foster and maintain collective resources outside of this framework. Many alternative systems have developed parallel sets of norms and rules to oversee their commons sustainably, preserving the autonomy and freedom of individual choice and generating higher efficiency than can be gained through distributive enterprises operated as private monopolies or state hierarchies.

These resource communities incorporate the underlying principles of the Market State -- the spontaneous, self-regulating social order of markets and the rule-based systems of state enforcement -- yet go beyond them by rejecting privatization, centralization and the idea that institutional change can come only from the top of a social hierarchy. People in traditional communities generate resilient and effective resource management based on local ideas, learning, imagination and deliberation. Emerging commons such as the internet demonstrate similar properties of shared administration and value creation through social innovation and open designs. Such centers of decision-making, focused on the choices of individuals and the institutional context of those choices through dialogue and negotiation, enable individuals in diverse communities to discern their common interests for self-corrective action. Hence, the institutional structures of the commons -- formally independent of each other yet guided according to social rules -- are a realm of production and governance beyond the modern division of labor.

The key is involving resource users in the process of production. This should be self- evident, since users are often the first to recognize problems and identify solutions in the allocation and provision of common goods. Praxis is the enactment or realization of a lesson or skill. In contrast to the Market Stateʼs model of the Ê»deliveryʼ of goods and services to a passive public, when consumers are co-producers of the goods and services they receive and organize, this practical and applied knowledge is embodied directly in their commoning. As co-producers, the motivations, knowledge and skills of resource users become part of the production praxis, leading to new ways of interacting and coordinating social and economic life. When people rediscover their shared labor, which they have minimized over the centuries through individual citizenship in the Market State, these new forms of production will transform current modes of economic, social and political decision-making. Hence, the praxis of the commons (the participative and power-sharing forms of organization among resource users and producers/ providers) isnʼt really new. Itʼs the ancient but much-neglected foundation of community.

Co-Governance

When resources are mismanaged, the development of covenants and institutions by consumer-producers is a critical step in protecting and sustaining them. A social charter is a formal declaration which outlines the rights and incentives of a community -- involving both local jurisdictions and the multijurisdictional environment -- for the supervision and protection of a common resource. The charter describes patterns of relationships between the resource and its users, managers and producers, allowing them all an opportunity to voice the mutual interests and responsibilities emerging from their rights to these common goods. The social charter empowers a geographical group and a broader association of stakeholders to hold a commons in trust for its beneficiaries, thereby safeguarding these vulnerable resources from the growing pressure to exploit them. This ensures that marginalized groups have access to common goods and that the benefits arising from their use are distributed in a fair and cooperative manner for present and future generations. Effective maintenance and preservation of a particular commons is thus generated through the collective action of citizens, customary representatives, social networks, academics, scientists, bilateral donors, development partners, regional organizers, intergovernmental organizations, independent media and other stakeholders -- with limited input from government and the private sector.

By encouraging a range of self-organizing capacities, social charters give substantial discretion to individuals in designing effective institutions matched to the local, regional and global scales of vital goods and services. This enables a diversity of individuals and officials to make rule-based adjustments for the stewardship of their commons through multiple centers of power and decision-making. Social charters have been developed for forests, pastures, irrigation systems, water, fisheries, internet, knowledge, genetic resources, public health, energy, landscapes, historic sites and other domains. Examples of commons-based social charters include Heritable Innovation Trust; Creative Commons; WANA (West Asia-North Africa) Forum; Charter of the Cultural Forum of Barcelona for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge; Praja Foundation; Pacific Youth Charter; Peopleʼs Charter for Health; and the Sky Charter proposed by State of the World Forum. Resource communities like these express the values of democracy, equity and justice by managing a commons as directly and locally as possible. Through their transparent decision-making and decentralized control, such social chartered initiatives generate an entirely new context for collective action.

Rights of the Commons

Social charters are based on commons rights. Commons rights differ from human rights and civil rights because they arise, not through the legislation of a state, but through a customary or emerging identification with an ecology, a cultural resource area, a social need or a form of mutual labor. By expressing the rationale behind a groupʼs collective actions and the importance of understanding who shares what, how it is shared, and how it may be sustained for future generations and species, commons rights affirm the sovereignty of people over their means of sustenance and well-being. In the early 21st century, there is an emerging recognition around the world that human beings are sovereign -- not their governments. Instead of seeking individual and human rights from the state, people may now claim long-term authority over resources, governance and social value as their planetary birthrights, whether at a local or global level. As an initiative of citizens and officials for governing the use and disposition of resources, those who create a social charter thus ensure that administrative power is decentralized in order to maintain community access to, and power over, their own commons.

Business and government are both needed for a commons to flourish, but under new sets of conditions. Through the increasing awareness of peopleʼs inherent rights to their shared resources, businesses will ultimately recognize their dependence on these common goods, and governments will give as much attention and support to the local institutions of the commons as they currently extend to private companies. As commons stakeholders create their own formal declarations and institutions, the role of the state will become much more balanced between enabling the people of the commons and enabling corporations. After all, commons and businesses are the worldʼs two primary sources of value creation. Instead of regulating commerce and finance in the public interest (while also regulating the commons for the benefit of commerce and finance), a new responsibility of the state will be to recognize peopleʼs locally developed rules for a commons by confirming and upholding their social charters. This allows resource communities to enforce their own rules and coordinate their sources of sustenance, livelihood and collective wealth without being challenged by external authorities.

To Create a Social Charter

With the growing interconnectivity of people, goods, technology and institutions, a new approach is needed for a new world. Instead of the unitary decision-making, monitoring and enforcement of the Market State, social charters focus the praxis of a commons upon the characteristics of goods and services and the freedom of choice of resource users in production and governance. This expression of autonomy, intentionality and intelligence around the shared values of collective production and consumption represents a new ontology of social order. When people discover or invent a commons, their self-interest aligns with collective interests and relationships, and this personal engagement and independence is distributed throughout the collaborative network. The framework of a social charter operationalizes these emerging interests and practices, generating higher efficiency, more secure livelihoods, and greater personal and social meaning than enterprises which presume that individuals must be supervised through the command structures and exclusionary boundaries of private and state property. Since every commons varies by its specific resources, history, means of governance and production, and the social and cultural character of the community which uses or produces these common goods, there is no universal template for social charters. But a practical baseline is emerging. A social charter for a particular commons would include:

1. Vision and Mission Statement

2. Historical Claims
• a description of the existing users, boundaries, power and control of a commons
• a summary of traditional or emerging claims to legitimacy and responsibility for
preserving the common resource
• a notice of claims to reparations or re-territorialization of resource boundaries

3. Rights to Fair Access and Use
• a declaration of the usersʼ rights to organize and participate in the development of new institutions and rules
• a statement of the entitlements and responsibilities of users, managers, and producers of the commons
• a statement of equitably shared benefits, quality standards and safeguards
• a code of ethics and common values

4. Resource Management
• a quantifiable set of non-monetized metrics for measuring the common resource
• a means of matching the rules of provision and appropriation to local conditions
• a framework for democratic and transparent decision-making and participation
• a structure of accountability for conflict resolution and redress of grievances
• a process of monitoring and evaluation

“Commons are institutional spaces in which we are free.”
Yochai Benkler

How the crisis reveals the fabric of our commons

Over the last two hundred years, the explosion of knowledge, technology, and productivity has enabled an unprecedented increase of private wealth. This has improved our quality of life in numerous ways. At the same time, however, we have permitted the depletion of resources and the dwindling of societal wealth. This is brought to our attention by current, interrelated crises in finance, the economy, nutrition, energy, and in the fundamental ecological systems of life. These crises are sharpening our awareness of the existence and importance of the commons. Natural commons are necessary for our survival, while social commons ensure social cohesion, and cultural commons enable us to evolve as individuals. It is imperative that we focus our personal creativity, talents, and enthusiasm on protecting and increasing our social wealth and natural commons. This will require a change in some basic structures of politics, economics, and society. 

More social prosperity instead of more gross domestic product! When the economic growth curve drops and the GDP sinks, it seems threatening to us. Yet appearances deceive. The GDP merely maps production figures and monetary flows without regard for their ecological or social value; such numbers do not measure the things we truly need to live, – they may simply count their destruction. Social prosperity cannot be measured through such means. A reduction in the GDP does not necessarily signal a reduction in the real wealth of a society. Recognizing this fact widens our perspective and opens doors for new types of solutions. 

The commons can help us overcome the crisis, but it requires systematic advocacy. This is our contribution to give the commons a voice. 

What are the commons and why are they are significant?

Commons are diverse. They are the fundamental building blocks and pre-condition of our life and social wealth. They include knowledge and water, seeds and software, cultural
works and the atmosphere. Commons are not just “things,” however. They are living, dynamic systems of life. They form the social fabric of a free society.

Commons do not belong to anyone individually nor do they belong to no one. Different communities, from the family to global society, always create, maintain, cultivate, and redefine commons. When this does not happen, commons dwindle away – and in the process, our personal and social security diminishes. Commons ensure that people can live and evolve. The diversity of the commons helps secure our future.

Commons are the foundation of every economic activity. Thus, they must also be the result of what we do. We have to constantly revitalize our commons, because everything we produce relies upon the knowledge we inherit, the natural resources that the Earth gives us, and cooperation with our fellow citizens. The activity known as “the economy” is embedded in our social fabric. Depletion of resources, failures in education, needless barriers to creativity, and weak social bonds compromise the generativity of the whole. Without vital commons, production is impossible. Without commons, companies cannot earn money. 

Commons are often destroyed and thus driven from our consciousness. One reason that commons are threatened is because many individuals claim a limitless right to use things. But where fair usage rights to water and seeds are curtailed by economic calculation or through governmental policies, where resource exploitation destroys our natural inheritance, where breach upon breach is inflicted on public spaces, where patenting software limits creativity and impedes economic progress, where reliable networks are lacking, there dependency and uncertainty will increase. 

There‘s something new afoot – a movement to reclaim the commons! 

There is a movement that reminds us of what is worth keeping. A movement that seeks to reclaim what belongs to us, that affirms human dignity and creates something new. This movement to build and protect the commons is expanding the horizon of what is possible. 

Commons are being rediscovered and defended. People all over the world are defending themselves against attacks on the web of life that sustains them – against dams and mining projects that destroy life and land. Against a wasteful economy that fuels climate change. Against efforts to turn education and health into profit-oriented thinking. Against the re-engineering of our genetic heritage and overzealous restrictions on access to knowledge and culture. The commoners seek only to reclaim that which belongs to them, whether they are communities struggling to win back control over water utilities, indigenous communities seeking to protect its land in the Amazon Basin, or the worldwide movements for climate justice and an open internet. 

Commons are newly created and built upon. Countless people are creating new things for all and meaningful social and physical spaces for themselves. They invest energy in community
gardens, carry out sustainable and ecological agriculture, and design intergenerational living and working spaces. They produce free software and free knowledge, and create films, music, and images to be shared. Thus emerges a treasure of free culture available to all. It is maintained and enhanced by many, and it has become as indispensable as Wikipedia. Taken together, scientists and activists, citizens and politicians are developing a robust and innovative commons sphere – everywhere. 

Commons are maintained and cultivated. People are fostering neighborhood institutions, looking after playgrounds, running citizen foundations, and creating and sharing stories, culture, and our collective memories. They are engaging themselves, personally and directly, with the common wealth and are pushing the state to carry out its duties to protect the commons. For that they gain something in return, because to live in a culture of commons means both giving and taking. This culture establishes rights and duties equally. The commitment to our common wealth is borne from the awareness that the current economic model endangers our livelihoods – and fails to satisfy us at deeper levels. This commitment corresponds to the wish for creativity and inspiration. It is fueled by our self-directed passions, desire for social conviviality, and a sensitivity and mutual recognition of each other. It‘s all about a simple idea: the need to learn from each other and to create excellent things for their own sake. 

Commons inspire and connect. To take them into account requires a fundamentally different approach in perception and action. Commons are based on communities that set their own rules and cultivate their skills and values. Based on these always-evolving, conflict-ridden processes, communities integrate themselves into the bigger picture. In a culture of commons, inclusion is more important than exclusion,cooperation more important than competition, autonomy more important than control. Rejecting the monopolization of information, wealth, and power gives rise to diversity again and again. Nature appears as a common wealth that must be carefully stewarded, and not an ever-available property to be exploited. 

To live in a culture of the commons means to assume shared, long-term responsibility rather than the pursuit of an ethics of dominance. A culture of the commons honors fairness over unilateral benefit optimization, and interdependence rather than extreme individualism. 

The commons helps us confront one of the major social justice issues of our time: no one may extract more from the commons than what he gives back to the commons. This applies to market players as well as the state. Whoever replenishes and expands the commons, rather than just drawing from them, deserves social recognition and praise. In the interest of this and future generations, market players, the state, and each individual must align their behavior and thinking with the commons. This must become a fundamental element in any calculation of economic,political, or personal success. 

Neither no man‘s land nor boundless property 

The commons is not only about the legal forms of ownership. What matters most is whether and how community-based rights to the commons are enforced and secured. „Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good“ (Article 14 Paragraph 2, German Constitution). This limitation, anchored in the basic law, designates the boundaries of the availability of common pool resources to individuals. This principle helps us recognize that each single use has implications for resources that belong to us all. With my phone I transmit my message through the finite electromagnetic spectrum. My car pollutes our shared air. My work may contain a novel thought, but I also depend upon the commons of culture and knowledge to inform it. The usage rights of fellow commoners are the stop signs for individual usage rights. 

Absolute and exclusive private property rights in the commons therefore cannot be allowed. This principle applies regardless of whether the things are of a tangible or intangible nature, or whether they are associated with natural, cultural, or social spheres. In order to avoid overuse and under-utilization – the dramatic plundering of fish or the “orphaning” of creative works, for example – any form of property (itself a creation of the state) has to now, more than ever, be measured by two conditions: Each use must ensure that the common pool resources are not destroyed or over-consumed. No one may be excluded who is entitled to access and use the shared resource or who depends on it for basic needs. Access and usage rights must therefore be designed to assure that the commons can be preserved, maintained, and further developed. These are the principles of fair participation and sustainability.

What is public or publicly funded must remain publicly accessible. Public research, for example, must be available to everyone. There is no overwhelming reason to grant publishers and pharmaceutical corporations excessive and exclusive copyrights and patents over publicly funded research. Legislatures, at the behest of business, have nevertheless done so, making scientific journals inaccessible and vital medicines overly expensive. Alternatives arise from the commons movement. This is demonstrated by numerous projects for fairer licensing and alternative incentive models in science and culture. 

The commons helps us reconceptualize the prevailing concept of property rights. The exploitation of our commons has grave drawbacks for the majority of people living today and tomorrow. This is demonstrated by climate change and the exhaustion of many natural resources, as well as by the financial sector whose private profit motives have become, to the detriment of the commoners, ends in themselves. Our shared quality of life is also limited by knowledge that is excessively commercialized and made artificially scarce. In this manner, our cultural heritage becomes an inventory of lifeless commodities and advertising dominates our public spaces. 

Commons are the basis of life in a double sense. Without natural commons, there’s no survival. Without cultural commons, no human development. Everyone is directly affected by the issues raised here. Even businesses need commons in order to earn money now and in the future. We all need commons to survive and thrive. This is a key principle, and it establishes why commoners‘ usage rights should always be given a higher priority than corporations‘ property rights. Here the state has a duty to protect the commons, a duty which it cannot abandon. However, this does not mean that the state is necessarily the best steward for the commoners‘ interests. The challenge is for the commoners themselves to develop complementary institutions and organizational forms, as well as innovative access and usage rules, to protect the commons. The commoners must create their own commons sector, beyond the realm of market and state, to serve the public good in their own distinctive manner. 

For a society in which the commons may thrive 

Just as commons and people are different, so are the organizational forms of user communities. We encounter these forms everywhere and with many faces: as self-organizing groups, civil organizations, private agencies or networks, as cooperatives or custodial organizations, as small neighborhood communities or the international Free Software movement. The rules and ethics of each commons arise from the needs and processes of the commoners directly involved. Whoever is directly connected to a commons must participate in the debate and implementation of its rules. 

Agents of the commons do not have one but many centers. We need them locally, regionally, and globally. Conflicts can be resolved directly in well-arranged communities and their commons. But the global commons is an almost insolvable challenge, because where does the “world community“ really come together and define itself as such? How should it agree upon the sustainable usage of its shared resources? The more complex the system, the more important it is that there is an institutional and transparent framework for the careful management of the commons. When the state achieves this and protects the commons, government action will be supported by society.

Commons need more than just rules. We must realize that rules require the art of proper application. Commons are driven by a specific ethos, as well as by the desire to acquire and transfer a myriad of skills. Our society therefore needs to honor the special skills and values that enable the commons to work well. A culture of the commons publicly recognizes any initiative or project that enhances the commons, and it provides active financial and institutional support to enhance the commons sector. 

Conflicts are part of the diversity and constant reproduction of the commons. In addition to the rule of law, commons in the future will require innovative institutional structures, conciliation and mediation bodies, networks, and interdisciplinary stewards for the commons. These institutions will be constructed again and again from the areas of needs and conflict. Each has a common goal: to raise a strong voice to preserve the commons! 

Awareness of the commons means being conscious of our living conditions and exploring on all levels how much productivity and wealth we create directly from the commons. It requires a fundamental shift in thinking about the foundations of society. It means using, sharing, and multiplying our common wealth in a free and self-determined way. This challenge requires a lot of work, but it is also a great source of personal satisfaction and enrichment.

Our society needs a great debate and a worldwide movement for the commons. Now!

Sections:

• Introduction

• Open Networks Spur New Business Models

• Open Content as a Gateway to Commercial Opportunities

• Commoners as Co-creators of Value

• Reintegrating the Sharing and Commercial Economies

The commons and the market can be great partners if each shows respect for the other and ingenuity in working together. Entrepreneur John Buckman concedes that his Internet record label, Magnatune, amounts to “building a business model on top of chaos.”1 That is to say,he makes money by honoring open networks and people’s natural social inclinations. The company rejects the proprietary muscle games used by its mainstream rivals, and instead holds itself to an ethical standard that verges on the sanctimonious: “We are not evil.”In the music industry these days, a straight shooter apparently has to be that blunt.

Magnatune is a four-person enterprise based in Berkeley, California, that since 2003 has been pioneering a new open business model for identifying and distributing high-quality new music. It does not lock up the music with anticopying technology or digital rights management. It does not exploit its artists with coercive, unfair contracts. It does not harass its customers for making unauthorized copies. Internet users can in fact listen to all of Magnatune’s music for free (not just music snippets) via online streaming.2 Buckman, a former software programmer turned entrepreneur in his thirties, previously founded and ran Lyris Technologies, an e-mail list management company that he sold in 2005. In deciding to start Magnatune, he took note of the obvious realities that the music industry has tried to ignore: radio is boring, CDs cost too much, record labels exploit their artists, file sharing is not going to go away, people love to share music, and listening to music on the Internet is too much work. “I thought,why not make a record label that has a clue?” said Buckman.

Well before the band Radiohead released its In Rainbows album with a “pay what you want”experiment,Magnatune was inviting its customers to choose the amount they would be willing to pay, from $5 to $18, for any of Magnatune’s 547 albums. Buckman explains that the arrangement signals a respect for customers who, after all, have lots of free music choices. It also gives them a chance to express their appreciation for artists, who receive 50 percent of the sales price. “It turns out that people are quite generous and they pay on average about $8.40, and they really don’t get anything more for paying more other than feeling like they’re doing the right thing,” said Buckman.4 About 20 percent pay more than $12.5 “The reality is today nobody really needs to pay for music at all,” he acknowledges. “If you choose to hit the ‘buy’ button at Magnatune then you’re one of the people who has decided to actually pay for music. Shouldn’t we reflect that honest behavior back and say,well, if you’re one of the honest people how much do you want to pay?”6 The set-your-own-price approach is part of Magnatune’s larger strategy of building the business by cultivating open, interactive relationships with its customers and artists. “If you set up a trusting world,” explains Buckman, “you can be rewarded.” Magnatune’s business model embraces the openness of the Internet and makes it a virtue, rather than treating it as a bothersome liability that must be elaborately suppressed. All of Magnatune’s music is released as MP3 files, with no digital rights management, under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.This means that customers can legally make their own remixes and covers of songs, and take samples, so long as the uses are noncommercial and carry the same CC license. Magnatune also invites customers to give free downloads of purchased music to three friends. Podcasters have free access to the entire Magnatune catalog.

By using a CC license,Magnatune saves a bundle by not having to oversee complex terms and conditions for usage of music. Nor does it have to maintain a DRM system and police the behavior of its customers, both of which squander a key marketing asset: consumer goodwill. Instead, the music circulates freely and, in so doing, expands public awareness of Magnatune’s 244 artists. Two-thirds of Magnatune’s revenues comes from licensing its music to films, ads, television, and shops.Like so many open business models, it has carved out a mid-tier niche between “expensive and proprietary” and “cheap and crummy.” Most mainstream music licensing involves either expensive,highly lawyered deals with record labels or insipid stock music from royalty-free CDs. Magnatune’s innovation is to offer high-quality music in multiple genres at flatrate licenses for sixteen different usage scenarios. The deals can be easily consummated via the Web; artists share in half the proceeds. No accounting flimflam.To date, Magnatune has licensed its music to more than one thousand indie films and many commercials. Magnatune is a small, fledgling enterprise in the $4 billion music industry. It does not have all the answers, and it may be sideswiped by bigger players at some point. But Magnatune is lean, nimble, profitable, and growing. It has shown how innovative business models can flourish in the open environment of the Internet. Unlike its bloated, besieged competitors, Magnatune is willing to listen closely to its customers, artists, and licensing clients. It is fair-minded and straightforward; it wants to share the wealth and let the music flow.

Open Networks Spur New Business Models

Openness does not come intuitively to many businesses. Competitive advantage has long been associated with exclusive control and secrecy. But as the Internet’s power expands, conventional businesses are feeling pressures to rethink their “closed” business models. A new breed of “open businesses” is demonstrating that a reliance on open-source software, open content, and an ethic of transparency in dealings with all corporate stakeholders can be tremendously competitive.

Open businesses understand the Great Value Shift discussed in chapter 5—that working through open networks and commons is likely to generate greater consumer attention, engagement, and loyalty—and thus sales—and may outperform a more exclusive regime of control.Working on an open network is also the best way for a company to get smarter faster, and to stay alert to changing market conditions. It bears noting that business models are not an either/or choice—that is, all open or all closed. There is a continuum of choices, as we will see below. Sometimes there are heated strategic and moral debates about what level of openness to adopt, yet the general trend in business today is clear: toward openness. Even as broadcast networks decry the posting of copyrighted television programs on YouTube, they clearly welcome the ratings spikes that ensue. Wireless telephony is fragmented among many
proprietary systems, but pressures are now growing to make them compete on an open platform.7 European regulators are calling for “open document format”standards to prevent Microsoft from abusing its proprietary standards in its Office suite of software. There are even calls for open standards for avatars in virtual worlds like Second Life, The Lounge, and Entropia Universe, so that our digital alter egos can glide from one virtual community to another.

Why this inexorable trend toward openness? Because on open networks, excessive control can be counterproductive. The overall value that can be created through interoperability is usually greater than the value that any single player may reap from maintaining its own “walled network.”9 For a company to reap value from interoperability, however, it must be willing to compete on an open platform and it must be willing to share technical standards, infrastructure, or content with others. Once this occurs, proprietary gains come from competing to find more sophisticated ways to add value in the production chain, rather than fighting to monopolize basic resources. Advantage also accrues to the company that develops trusting relationships with a community of customers.

Free software was one of the earliest demonstrations of the power of online commons as a way to create value. In his classic 1997 essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” hacker Eric S. Raymond provided a seminal analysis explaining how open networks make software development more cost-effective and innovative than software developed by a single firm.10 A wide-open “bazaar” such as the global Linux community can construct a more versatile operating system than one designed by a closed “cathedral” such as Microsoft. “With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow,” Raymond famously declared. Yochai Benkler gave a more formal economic reckoning of the value proposition of open networks in his pioneering 2002 essay “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm.”11 The title is a puckish commentary on how GNU/Linux, whose mascot is a penguin, poses an empirical challenge to economist Ronald Coase’s celebrated “transaction cost” theory of the firm. In 1937, Coase stated that the economic rationale for forming a business enterprise is its ability to assert clear property rights and
manage employees and production more efficiently than contracting out to the marketplace.

What is remarkable about peer production on open networks, said Benkler, is that it undercuts the economic rationale for the firm; commons-based peer production can perform certain tasks more efficiently than a corporation. Those tasks must be modular and divisible into small components and capable of being efficiently integrated, Benkler stipulated. The larger point is that value is created on open networks in very different ways than in conventional markets. Asserting proprietary control on network platforms may prevent huge numbers of people from giving your work (free) social visibility, contributing new value to it, or remixing it. “The only thing worse than being sampled on the Internet,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, with apologies to Oscar Wilde, “is not being sampled on the Internet.”

The New York Times’s experience with its paid subscription service, TimesSelect, offers a great example. The Times once charged about fifty dollars a year for online access to its premier columnists and news archives. Despite attracting more than 227,000 subscribers and generating about $10 million a year in revenue, the Times discontinued the service in 2007.12 A Times executive explained that lost subscription revenues would be more than offset by advertising to a much larger online readership with free access. The Financial Times and the Economist have dropped their paywalls, and the Wall Street Journal in effect has done so by allowing free access via search engines and link sites. From some leading citadels of capitalism, a rough consensus had emerged: exclusivity can decrease the value of online content. While enormous value can be created on open networks, it can take different forms, notes David P. Reed, who studies information architectures.

One of the most powerful types of network value is what Reed calls “Group-Forming Networks,” or GFNs—or what Benkler might call commons-based peer production and I would
call, less precisely, the commons. Reed talks about “scale-driven value shifts” that occur as a network grows in size. Greater value is mcreated as a network moves from a broadcast model (where “content is king”) to peer production (where transactions dominate) and finally, to a group-forming network or commons (where jointly constructed value is produced and shared). It is unclear, as a theoretical matter, how to characterize the size and behavior of various “value networks” on the Web today. For simplicity’s stake—and because Web platforms are evolving so rapidly— I refer to two general value propositions, Web 2.0 and the commons. Web 2.0 is about creating new types of value through participation in distributed open networks; the commons is a subset of Web 2.0 that describes fairly distinct, self-governed communities that focus on their own interests, which usually do not involve moneymaking. The rise of Web 2.0 platforms and the commons clearly has some serious implications for business strategy and organization. Just consider how Craigslist is displacing millions of dollars of classified newspaper ads; how open-access journals are threatening the economic base of commercial academic journals; and how usergenerated content is competing with network television. At the same time, activities that once occurred through informal social means (finding a date, organizing a gathering, obtaining word-ofmouth recommendations) are increasingly becoming commercial endeavors on the Web. Especially when the commons has strong mechanisms to preserve its value-creating capacity, such as the GPL,
open networks are helping to convert more market activity into commons-based activity, or at least shifting the boundary between commodity markets and proprietary, high-value-added markets. As this dynamic proceeds, the social and the commercial are blurring more than ever before. Many “value chains” that have long sustained conventional businesses are being disrupted. As described in chapter 5, more efficient types of distributed media are disrupting the production/distribution chain that sustains Centralized Media. The Long Tail lets online
consumers “pull” niche products that they want rather than enduring a relentless marketing “push” of products they don’t want. Commons-based peer production is a nonmarket version of the Long Tail: dispersed communities of people with niche interests can find one another, form social communities, bypass the market, and collaborate to create the niche resources that they want. The question facing many businesses is how to develop stable, long-term business models that can coexist with productive commons, if not leverage them for market gain. Their goal is to find ingenious ways to “monetize” the social relationships of online communities (by selling targeted advertising, personal data, niche products, etc.). Open businesses aim to do this in a respectful, public-spirited way; other, more traditional firms may have fewer scruples because, for them, “it’s all about the money.” But here’s the rub: a company can go only so far in monetizing the value-generating capacities of a commons without enclosing it or enraging the commoners.A company may consider itself shrewd for acquiring the copyrights for user-generated content, for example, or for blocking user access to third-party widgets that it disapproves of.  But participants in Web 2.0 communities will protest or simply leave if a corporate host starts to dictate obnoxious policies. A company can try to run its Web 2.0 platform as a feudal fiefdom, but it risks inciting users to revolt and start their own (nonmarket)
online communities, reinventing themselves as commoners. Although there is an implicit social ethic to Web 2.0 platforms,none is necessarily “free” in the Stallman sense of “freedom.”

Unfortunately, there is no clear consensus about how exactly to define an “open business.” Accordingly, assessments of their social, political, or economic virtue can be slippery. Some analysts such as Henry Chesbrough regard a business as “open” if it relaxes or modifies its intellectual property controls, or changes its organizational practices, as a way to reap value from open networks.16 Others believe that an open business should use open-source software, and support the copying and sharing of works through CC or other open-content licenses. Sometimes the idea of open business is yoked to a vaguely defined notion of “social responsibility.” It is not always clear whether this ethic is a moral gloss or a structural feature, but in general open businesses strive to practice a more open, accountable, and socially enlightened vision of commerce.

One champion of this vision is OpenBusiness,a Web site jointly created by Creative Commons UK in partnership with CC Brazil and the FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The mission of OpenBusiness is to “analyze and explain models by which people can share their knowledge and creativity with others whilst at the same time enjoying the more traditional incentives of profit, individual success and societal advancement.”17 By its lights, an open business is commons-friendly if it is committed to “transparency,” “sustainable systems,” and to putting “the health and welfare of people above everything else.” An open business also tries to generate as many “positive externalities” as possible—knowledge, social relationships, revenues—which it is willing to share with its stakeholders.

It is perhaps best to approach open businesses as an eclectic social phenomenon in search of a theory. As it has been said about Wikipedia, “It works in practice, but not in theory.”18 It is risky to overtheorize phenomena that are still fluid and emerging. Still, specific examples of open business can help us understand some basic principles of open networks,and how some businesses are using CC licenses to build innovative sorts of enterprises. Share the Wealth, Grow a Commercial Ecosystem The idea that a company can make money by giving away something for free seems so counterintuitive, if not ridiculous, that conventional business people tend to dismiss it. Sometimes they protesteth too much, as when Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer compared the GNU GPL to a “cancer”and lambasted open-source software as having “characteristics of communism.”19 In truth, “sharing the wealth” has become a familiar strategy for companies seeking to develop new technology markets. The company that is the first mover in an emerging commercial ecosystem is likely to become the dominant
player, which may enable it to extract a disproportionate share of future market rents. Giving away one’s code or content can be a great way to become a dominant first mover. Netscape was one of the first to demonstrate the power of this model with its release of its famous Navigator browser in 1994.The free distribution to Internet users helped develop the Web as a social and technological ecosystem, while helping fuel sales of Netscape’s Web server software. (This was before Microsoft arrived on the scene with its Internet Explorer,but that’s another story.) At a much larger scale, IBM saw enormous opportunities for building a better product by using GNU/Linux. The system would let IBM leverage other people’s talents at a fraction of the cost and strengthen its service relationships with customers. The company now earns more than $2 billion a year from Linux-related services.

Today, sharing and openness are key to many business strategies. “Open Source: Now It’s an Ecosystem,” wrote BusinessWeek in 2005, describing the “gold rush” of venture capital firms investing in startups with open-source products. Most of them planned to give away their software via the Web and charge for premium versions or for training, maintenance, and support. The pioneers in using open platforms to develop commercial ecosystems on the Internet are Amazon, Google,Yahoo, and eBay. Each has devised systems that let third-party software developers and businesses extend their platform with new applications and business synergies. Each uses systems that dynamically leverage users’ social behaviors and so stimulate business—for example, customer recommendations about books, search algorithms that identify the most popular Web sites, and reputation systems that enhance consumer confidence in sellers.Even Microsoft,eager to expand the ecology of developers using its products, has released 150 of its source code distributions under three “Shared Source” licenses, two of which meet the Free Software Foundation’s definition of “free.” More recently, Facebook has used its phenomenal reach—more than 80 million active users worldwide—as a platform for growing a diversified ecology of applications. The company allows software developers to create custom software programs that do such things as let users share reviews of favorite books, play Scrabble or poker with others online,or send virtual gifts to friends.Some apps are just for fun; others are the infrastructure for independent businesses that sell products and services or advertise. In September 2007, Facebook had more than two thousand software applications being used by at least one hundred people.

Open Content as a Gateway to Commercial Opportunities

Of course, not every business can own a major platform, as Google, eBay, and Facebook do. Still, there are many other opportunities. One of the most popular is to use open platforms to attract an audience, and then strike a deal with an advertiser or commercial distributor, or sell premium services (“get discovered”). Another approach is to use open content to forge a spirited community to which things may be sold (“build a market on a commons”). Get discovered. This dynamic has been played out countless times on YouTube,MySpace, Facebook, and other high-traffic social networking sites. An unknown remix artist suddenly becomes famous when his track is discovered by a network swarm: the story of DJ Danger Mouse that we saw in chapter 6. A band attracts a huge following through viral word of mouth: the story of Jake Shapiro and Two Ton Shoe’s stardom in South Korea. There are even calculated scams to get discovered, like the lonelygirl15 series of videos purportedly shot by a teenage girl in her bedroom, which became a huge Internet sensation in 2006.

As any television network will tell you, the capacity to aggregate audiences is worth a lot of money. The customary way of monetizing this talent is to sell advertising. Or one can parlay newfound name recognition into side deals with the mass media, which have always depended upon “star power” as a draw.Thus,Ana Marie Cox was able to parley her notoriety as a political gossip on her Wonkette blog into a job as Washington editor of Time magazine. Perez Hilton, a Hollywood blogger who attracted a following,was offered  a lucrative perch at the E! cable television channel.We saw in chapter 6 how producer Samuli Torssonen’s Star Wreck attracted millions of Internet viewers, enabling him to strike a deal with Universal Studios to distribute a DVD version.With the same visions of stardom, or at least paying gigs, in mind, thousands of bands now have fan sites, music downloads, and banner ads on MySpace and other sites to promote themselves.

The CC NonCommercial license is one way to help pursue the “get discovered”business strategy. The license allows authors to seek a global Internet audience without having to cede rights to any commercial opportunities. It is not, however, a terribly reliable way to make money, which is why some artists, especially musicians,find fault with the implicit promise of the NC license. Many serious artists regard the NC license as too speculative a mechanism to get paid for one’s creative work. It is a fair complaint, as far as it goes.The real problem is the closed, highly concentrated music industry, which has a hammerlock on marketing, radio play, and distribution. Newcomers and mid-tier talent cannot get past the corporate gatekeepers
to reach an audience, let alone make money.

In an attempt to bridge the sharing economy with the market, and thereby open up some new channels of commercial distribution for commoners, the Creative Commons in late 2007 introduced a new protocol,CC+.The new project aims to make it easier for the owners of NC-licensed content to signal that agreements, products, or services beyond the scope of the CC licenses are on offer—for example, commercial licensing, warranties, or higherquality copies. A photographer who has hundreds of NC-licensed photos on Flickr would be able to continue to let people use those photos for noncommercial purposes—but through CC+, he could also sell licensing rights to those who want to use the photos for commercial purposes. CC+ is a metadata architecture and standard that allows third-party intermediaries to develop services for consummating commercial transactions. People can use CC+ as a simple “click-through”mechanism for acquiring commercial rights for music, photos, text, and other content.

One of the earliest “copyright management” companies to take advantage of the CC+ standard was RightsAgent, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company founded by Rudy Rouhana. RightsAgent essentially acts as a go-between for people who create NC-licensed works on the Web and those who wish to buy rights to use them for commercial purposes. Just as PayPal facilitates the exchange of money on the Internet, so RightsAgent aspires to be a paid intermediary for facilitating the sale of user-generated content. The rise of CC+ and associated companies brings to mind Niva Elkin-Koren’s warning that the Creative Commons licenses can be a slippery slope that merely promotes a property-oriented, transactional mentality—the opposite of the commons. On the other hand, many people operating in the noncommercial sharing economy, such as musicians and photographers, have long complained that, as much as they enjoy participating in the commons, they still need to earn a livelihood.

Revver is another company that has developed an ingenious way to promote the sharing of content,yet still monetize it based on the scale of its circulation. Revver is a Los Angeles–based startup that hosts user-generated video. All videos are embedded with a special tracking tag that displays an ad at the end. Like Google’s Ad- 0Words system, which charges advertisers for user “click-throughs” on ad links adjacent to Web content,Revver charges advertisers for every time a viewer clicks on an ad. The number of ad views can be tabulated, and Revver splits ad revenues 50-50 with video creators. Key to the whole business model is the use of the CC Attribution- NonCommercial-No Derivatives license. The license allows the videos to be legally shared, but prohibits anyone from modifying them or using them for commercial purposes.

One of the most-viewed videos on Revver sparked a minor pop trend.It showed kids dropping Mentos candies into bottles of Coca- Cola, which produces an explosive chemical reaction. The video is said to have generated around $30,000.26 So is new media going to feature silly cat videos and stupid stunts? Steven Starr, a co-founder of Revver, concedes the ubiquity of such videos, but is quick to point to “budding auteurs like Goodnight Burbank, Happy Slip, Studio8 and LoadingReadyRun, all building audiences.” He also notes that online, creators “can take incredible risks with format and genre, can grow their own audience at a fraction of network costs, can enjoy free syndication, hosting, audience-building and ad services at their disposal.”

Blip.tv is another video content-sharing Web site that splits ad revenues with video creators (although it is not automatic; users must “opt in”).Unlike many videos on YouTube and Revver,blip.tv tends to feature more professional-quality productions and serialized episodes, in part because its founders grew out of the “videoblogging” community. Blip.tv espouses an open business ethic, with shout-outs to “democratization, openness, and sustainability.” While there is a tradition for companies to spout their high-minded principles, blip.tv puts some bite into this claim by offering an open platform that supports many video formats and open metadata standards. And it allows content to be downloaded and shared on other sites. Users can also apply Creative Commons licenses to their videos, which can then be identified by CC-friendly search engines. For all these reasons, Lessig has singled out blip.tv as a “true sharing site,” in contrast to YouTube, which he calls a “faking sharing site” that “gives you tools to make it seem as if there’s sharing, but in fact, all the tools drive traffic and control back to a single site.”28 Lessig’s blog post on blip.tv provoked a heated response from blogger Nicholas Carr, a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review. The contretemps is worth a close look because it illuminates the tensions between Web 2.0 as a business platform and Web 2.0 as a commons platform. In castigating YouTube as a “fake sharing site,” Carr accused Lessig of sounding like Chairman Mao trying to root out counterrevolutionary forces (that is, capitalism) with “the ideology of digital communalism.”

Like Mao, Lessig and his comrades are not only on the wrong side of human nature and the wrong side of culture; they’re also on the wrong side of history. They fooled themselves into believing that Web 2.0 was introducing a new economic system—a system of “social production”—that would serve as the foundation of a democratic, utopian model of culture creation.They were wrong.Web 2.0’s economic system has turned out to be, in effect if not intent, a system of exploitation rather than a system of emancipation. By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work,Web 2.0 provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very, very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very, very few. The Cultural Revolution is over. It ended before it even began. The victors are the counterrevolutionaries. And they have $1.65 billion [a reference to the sale price of YouTube to Google] to prove it.

Lessig’s response, a warm-up for a new book, Remix, released in late 2008, pointed out that there are really three different economies on the Internet—commercial, sharing, and hybrid. The hybrid economy now emerging is difficult to understand, he suggested, because it “neither gives away everything, nor does it keep everything.” The challenge of open business models, Lessig argues, is to discover the “golden mean.”

It can be hard to conceptualize a “hybrid sector” when we are accustomed to dividing the world into “private” and “public” sectors, and “profit-making” and “nonprofit” enterprises. Open business models quickly run up against deep-seated prejudices that associate property with “freedom”and sharing with “communism.” How can there be a middle ground? Although some like Nicholas Carr seem to hanker for the predatory enterprises of an earlier capitalism, only this time on Web 2.0 platforms, that is not likely to happen in a world of distributed computing. Power is too dispersed for predators to survive very long, and besides, the commoners are too empowered.

Build a market on a commons. A number of online business models are based on building communities of deep social affection and respect, and then using the community as a platform for selling merchandise, advertising, or products. Interestingly, some of the most successful “customer relationship” models revolve around music. The Grateful Dead’s strategy of building a business around a rabid fan base (discussed in chapter 6) occurred well before the Internet became prevalent. It is paradigmatic of the digital age, nonetheless. If the band had locked up its music and prohibited free taping of its concert performances and sharing of homemade tapes, it would have effectively weakened the fan base that sustained its business model. Sharing concert tapes actually made Deadheads more inclined to buy t-shirts, official music releases, and concert tickets because the tape sharing deepened the community’s identity and quasi-spiritual ethic. The Grateful Dead’s focus on touring as opposed to studio albums not only intensified the sharing ethic of its fan base, it obliged the band to “keep on truckin’ ” in order to keep earning money.

The Brazilian tecnobrega music scene discussed briefly in chapter 7 is another example of artists making money through respectful, in-person relationships with their fans. In the town of Belém,Brazil, tecnobrega artists release about four hundred CDs every year, but none are sold in stores; street vendors sell them for $1.50 apiece.The CDs function mostly as advertising for live “sound system” parties on the outskirts of town that attract as many as five thousand people and use state-of-the-art audio technology. Immediately following the performances, some artists also sell a significant number of “instant CDs” that are of better quality (and more expensive) than those sold in the streets. (Interestingly, street sales do not compete with after-concert sales.)

“In their live presentations, the tecnobrega DJ’s usually acknowledge the presence of people from various neighborhoods,and this acknowledgement is of great value to the audience, leading thousands of buy copies of the recorded live presentation,” said Ronaldo Lemos of CC Brazil, who has studied Brazil’s record industry. 30 The same basic model is also at work in other grassroots musical genres in Brazil, such as baile funk, which originated in the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro.

Artists make most of their money from these live performances, not from CDs, said Lemos. Bands earn an average of $1,100 per solo performance at these events,and $700 when playing with other bands—this, in a region where the average monthly income is $350. Altogether, Lemos estimates that the sound system parties as abusiness sector earn $1.5 million per month, on fixed assets of $8 million.

“The band Calypso has been approached several times by traditional record labels,” said Lemos, “but they turned down all the offers. The reason is that they make more money by means of the existing business model. In an interview with the largest Brazilian newspaper, the singer of the band said,‘We do not fight the pirates. We have become big because of piracy, which has taken our music to cities where they would never have been.’ ” Calypso has sold more than 5 million albums in Brazil and is known for attracting as many as fifty thousand people to its concerts, Lemos said.

Another highly successful open business model in the Brazilian music scene is TramaVirtual, an open platform on which more than 15,000 musicians have uploaded some 35,000 albums.Fans can then download the music for free. While this does not sound like a promising business proposition, it makes a lot of sense in the context of Brazil’s music marketplace. Major record labels release a minuscule number of new Brazilian music CDs each year, and they sell for about $10 to $15.32 Only the cultured elite can afford music CDs, and the native musical talent—which is plentiful in Brazil—has no place to go.With such a constricted marketplace,TramaVirtual has become hugely popular by showcasing new and interesting music. TramaVirtual’s artistic and social cachet—itself the product of open sharing in a commons—has enabled it to develop a highly respected brand identity. “By exploiting the trademark,” said Lemos, “Trama has been able to create parallel businesses that work with music, but not in the same way that a record label does.”33 For instance, Trama created a business that sponsors free concerts at universities under its trademark sponsorship. It then sells marketing rights at the concerts to cosmetic makers and car companies. Musicians have gained wide public exposure through Trama, and then used that association to negotiate international record and marketing deals for themselves. CSS (Cansei de Ser Sexy) won a record contract with the American label Sub Pop, for example.

For the past five years, a related business model for music on an international scale has been emerging in Luxembourg.In only three years, Jamendo has amassed a huge international following in much the same way as TramaVirtual—by attracting music fans to its open platform for free music sharing. (The name Jamendo is a mix of the words jam and crescendo.) The site is not a music retailer but a repository for free music—with a business model overlay to pay the bills.

Jamendo’s purpose is not to maximize returns to shareholders, in other words, but to service musicians and fans in a self-sustaining way. It makes most of its money from “tip jar” donations from fans and from advertising on the Web pages and streamed music. Ad revenues are shared 50-50 with artists, and any donations are passed along to individual artists, minus a small transaction fee.

The Jamendo community is sizable and growing. By 2008 it had more than 357,000 active members from around the world. Part
of the draw is the catalog of more than 10,000 albums, all free. Unlike Magnatune, Jamendo does not select the artists that are featured on its site; everyone is welcome to upload his or her music.To help fans identify music they like, the site offers many sophisticated tools. There are some 60,000 member-written reviews, custom playlists, community ratings of albums, and “folksonomy” tags for albums and songs.* Fans are urged to download music through peerto- peer networks such as BitTorrent and eMule because it reduces Jamendo’s bandwidth expenses.

“Users can listen,download,review, remix,and ‘widgetize,’ ”said Sylvain Zimmer, the founder and chief technology officer of Jamendo. As part of its commitment to musicians, the site has a forum * Folksonomies, a cross of taxonomy and folk, are essentially user-generated tags attached to each song and album,which enables categories of music to emerge from the “bottom up,” as fans regard the music, rather than through top-down marketing categories. for artists and listings of concerts, as well as open APIs* so the Jamendo ecosystem can be integrated into other software.

What’s striking about Jamendo is its nonchalant international feel, as if it were only natural to browse for “deathmetal,” “powerpop,” “hypnotique,” “ambient,” “psytrance,” and “jazzrock” on the same site. (These are just a few of the scores of folksonomy tags that can be used to browse the catalog.) “We are a Babel, not a label,”said Zimmer,who reports that India and Japan are heavy downloaders of Jamendo music. Complete, official versions of the site are available in French, the original language for the site, and now English and German. Incomplete versions of the site are available in Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Italian, Swedish, Czech, and Ukrainian.

Virtually all the albums on Jamendo use one or more of the six basic CC licenses. The CC ethic is a perfect match for the company’s community-driven business model, said Zimmer. “The best way of detecting CC-incompatible content and commercial uses of NC-licensed work is the community. The Creative Commons makes the community feel more confident and active.”34 He adds that if the site’s managers run too many ads, “the community will tell you.”

Commoners as Co-creators of Value

For businesses operating on open networks, it is a mistake to regard people merely as customers; they are collaborators and even coinvestors. As more companies learn to interact closely with their customers, it is only natural that conversations about the product or service become more intimate and collaborative. The roles of the * An API is an “application programming interface,”a set of protocols that enable a software application to operate on a computer operating system, library, or service. Many companies use proprietary APIs to retain control over who may develop applications that will interoperate with their software. Other companies that wish to encourage development of compatible applications—
and thus promote a software ecosystem entwined with the operating system or service—use open APIs. “consumer” and “producer” are starting to blur, leading to what some business analysts call the “prosumer”35 and the “decentralized co-creation of value.”36 The basic idea is that online social communities are becoming staging areas for the advancement of business objectives. Businesses see these communities as cost-effective ways to identify promising innovations, commercialize them more rapidly, tap into more reliable market intelligence, and nurture customer goodwill.

Amateurs who share with one another through a loose social commons have always been a source of fresh ideas.Tech analyst Elliot Maxwell (citing Lessig) notes how volunteers helped compile the Oxford English Dictionary by contributing examples of vernacular usage;how the Homebrew Computer Club in the San Francisco Bay area developed many elements of the first successful personal computer;and how sharing among auto enthusiasts helped generate many of the most important early automotive innovations.37 In our time, hackers were the ones who developed ingenious ways to use unlicensed electromagnetic spectrum as a commons,which we now know as Wi-Fi.They tinkered with the iPod to come up with podcasts, a new genre of broadcasting that commercial broadcasters now emulate.38 Numerous self-organized commons have incubated profitable businesses.Two movie buffs created the Internet Movie Database as separate Usenet newsgroups in 1989; six years later they had grown so large that they had merged and converted into a business that was later sold to Amazon.39 The Compact Disc Database was a free database of software applications that looks up information about audio CDs via the Internet. It was originally developed by a community of music fans as a shared database, but in 2000 it had grown big enough that it was sold and renamed Gracenote.40 A commons can be highly generative because its participants are tinkering and innovating for their own sake—for fun, to meet a challenge, to help someone out. Amateurs are not constrained by conventional business ideas about what may be marketable and profitable.They do not have to meet the investment expectations of venture capitalists and Wall Street.Yet once promising new ideas do surface in the commons,market players can play a useful role in supplying capital and management expertise to develop, improve, and commercialize an invention.

Because online commons are such a rich source of new ideas, the most farsighted companies are trying to learn how they might be harnessed to help them innovate and compete more effectively. MIT professor Eric von Hippel is one of the foremost researchers of this process. His 2005 book Democratizing Innovation describes how the leading participants in high-performance sports—extreme skiing, mountain biking, skateboarding, surfing, and hot-rodding—are forming “innovation communities” that work closely with manufacturers. 41 The most active practitioners of these sports are intimately familiar with the equipment and have their own imaginative ideas about what types of innovations the sport needs. Indeed,many of them have already jerry-rigged their own innovations—better cockpit ventilation in sailplanes, improved boot and bindings on snowboards, a method for cutting loose a trapped rope used by canyon climbers. For companies willing to listen to and collaborate with users, says von Hippel,“communities of interest are morphing into communities of creation and communities of production.” “Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents,” von Hippel writes. “Moreover, individuals users do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit from innovations developed and freely shared by others.”42 Besides finding empirical examples of this trend, von Hippel has developed a theoretical vocabulary for understanding how collaborative innovation occurs. He probes the user motivations for “free revealing” of their knowledge, the attractive economics that fuel “users’ low-cost innovation niches,” and the public policies that sometimes thwart user-driven innovation (patent rights for a field may be fragmented, anticopying restrictions such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act may prevent user tinkering, etc.).

User-driven innovation is not as esoteric as the “extreme sports” examples may suggest. It is, in fact, a growing paradigm. In one of the more celebrated examples, Lego, the Danish toymaker, invited some of its most fanatic users to help it redesign its Mind-storms robotics kit. The kits are meant to let kids (and adults) build a variety of customized robots out of a wild assortment of plastic Lego pieces, programmable software, sensors, and motors.43 In 2004, when some Lego users reverse-engineered the robotic “brain” for the Mindstorms kit and put their findings on the Internet, Lego at first contemplated legal action. Upon reflection, however, Lego realized that hackers could be a valuable source of new ideas for making its forthcoming Mindstorms kit more interesting and cool. Lego decided to write a “right to hack” provision into the Mindstorms software license, “giving hobbyists explicit permission to let their imaginations run wild,” as Brendan I. Koerner wrote in Wired magazine. “Soon, dozens of Web sites were hosting thirdparty programs that help Mindstorms users build robots that Lego had never dreamed of: soda machines, blackjack dealers, even toilet scrubbers. Hardware mavens designed sensors that were far more sophisticated than the touch and light sensors included in the factory kit.”44 It turns out that not only are Lego fans happy to advise the company, the open process “engenders goodwill and creates a buzz among the zealots, a critical asset for products like Mindstorms that rely on word-of-mouth evangelism,” said Koerner. In the end, he concluded, the Mindstorm community of fanatics has done “far more to add value to Lego’s robotics kit than the company itself.” Another improbable success in distributed, user-driven innovation is Threadless, a Chicago-based t-shirt company.Threadless sells hundreds of original t-shirt designs, each of which is selected by the user community from among more than eight hundred designs submitted every week. The proposed designs are rated on a scale of one to five by the Web site’s more than 600,000 active users.Winners receive cash awards, recognition on the Web site, and their names on the t-shirt label. Every week,Threadless offers six to ten new t-shirts featuring the winning designs.

In 2006, the company sold more than 1.5 million t-shirts without any traditional kind of marketing. Its business model is so rooted in the user community that Threadless co-founders Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart have declined offers to sell their t-shirts through conventional, big-name retailers. Threadless’s business model has helped it overcome two major challenges in the apparel industry, write Harvard Business School professor Karim R. Lakhani and consultant Jill A.Panetta—the ability “to attract the right design talent at the right time to create recurring fashion hits,” and the ability “ to forecast sales so as to be better able to match production cycles with demand cycles.”

A number of companies have started successful enterprises based on the use of wikis, the open Web platforms that allow anyone to contribute and edit content and collaborate. Evan Prodromou, the founder of Wikitravel, a free set of worldwide travel guides, has identified four major types of wiki businesses: service providers who sell access to wikis (Wikispace, wetpaint, PBwiki); content hosters of wikis (wikiHow,Wikitravel,Wikia); consultants who advise companies how to run their own wikis (Socialtext); and content developers (WikiBiz, an offshoot of Wikipedia).

Since the success of a wiki-based business depends upon honoring the integrity of wiki users, Prodromou scorns what he sees as the backhanded strategies of business models based on “wikinomics” and “crowdsourcing.” He sees such models as sly attempts to get “suckers” to do free work for the entrepreneur owning the business. A sustainable commercial wiki, said Prodromou at a conference, respects the community of users and does not try to exploit them.It strives to fulfill a “noble purpose”for users and demonstrate in a transparent way that it offers value .Any hint of trickery or calculation begins to sow distrust and erode the community. Yet any wiki-based business must be able to set boundaries that allow the owners to make responsible business decisions; those decisions, however,must respect the wiki community’s values.

It is hard to predict what new models of “decentralized cocreation of value” will take root and flourish, but the experiments are certainly proliferating. Staples, the office supplies store, now hosts a contest inviting the public to suggest inventions that Staples can develop and sell under the its brand name.47 A number of massmarket advertisers have hosted competitions inviting users to create ads for their products. One of the more interesting frontiers in userdriven innovation is tapping the audience for investment capital. SellaBand (“You are the record company”) is a Web site that invites bands to recruit five thousand “Believers” to invest $10 apiece in their favorite bands; upon reaching the $50,000 mark, a band can make a professional recording, which is then posted on the Sella- Band site for free downloads. Bands and fans can split advertising revenues with SellaBand.48 Robert Greenwald, the activist documentary filmmaker, used e-mail solicitations, social networks, and the blogosphere to ask ordinary citizens to help finance his 2006 film Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers.

Reintegrating the Sharing and Commercial Economies

If there is persistent skepticism about the very idea of open business models, from both business traditionalists focused on the bottom line and commoners committed to sharing, it is because the commons and the commercial economy seem to represent such divergent moral values and social orders. One depends upon reciprocal exchanges of monetary value, with the help of individual property rights and contracts; the other depends upon the informal social circulation of value, without individual property rights or quid pro quos. A market is impersonal, transactional, and oriented to a bottom line; a commons tends to be personal and social and oriented to continuous relationships, shared values, and identity.

Yet, as the examples above show, the market and the commons interpenetrate each other, yin/yang style. Each “adds value” to the other in synergistic ways. Historically, this has always been true. Adam Smith,the author of The Wealth of Nations,was also the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, about the moral and social norms that undergird market activity. The market has always depended upon the hidden subsidies of the commons (folk stories, vernacular motifs, amateur creativity) to drive its engine of wealth creation. And the commons builds its sharing regimes amid the material wealth produced by the market (free software is developed on commercially produced computers).

What has changed in recent years is our perceptions. The actual role of the commons in creative endeavors has become more culturally legible. For businesses to function well on Web 2.0 platforms, they must more consciously integrate social and market relationships in functional, sustainable ways. If the results sometimes seem novel, if not bizarre, it is partly because networking technologies are making us more aware that markets are not ahistorical, universal entities; they are rooted in social relationships. Open business models recognize this very elemental truth, and in this sense represent a grand gambit to go back to the future.

By James Quilligan

The Limits to Private and Public Goods

Thee opening decades of this century are a pivotal time in which many of our current beliefs and practices will be re-examined. During the last century, the economic and political catastrophes that befell the world inspired an earlier generation to create a multilateral system defined by an unprecedented vision of cooperation and security for the international community. It promised that global private goods (financial investment, private credit and trade) and global public goods (aid, loans through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and other assistance from international development programs) would resolve the world's major domestic and transborder economic problems. But this grand experiment in international cooperation has failed miserably.

For generations our resources have been under assault from global market forces, regional and national policy development, and inadequate legal recognition of common property rights. State capitalism, powered by cheap labor, fossil fuels, low commodity prices and unrealistic interest rates, has generated a planet wide 'fire sale', liquidating Earth's resources at an increasingly rapid pace. Now this centuries long credit boom of natural and material resources is ending and we are staring, incredulously, into a gigantic void of our own making. We have begun to see that the benefits of perpetual economic growth are not compensating for the vast damages and risks they create from energy insecurity, global warming, ecological degradation and species loss to hunger, poverty, debt and financial meltdown. We're also realizing that neither the private sphere of property and trade nor the public sphere of government provision and distribution which created these problems to begin with are capable of solving them. On one hand, international commerce cannot address the harmful externalities that transcend borders because global 'private' goods are profit-driven for the benefit of consumers and shareholders, not equity driven for the masses. On the other hand, sovereign governments are not equipped to manage global problems either by themselves or through a global institutional framework, since there is no actual 'public' governance at the international level to effectively manage and protect these resources for the world's people as a whole.

Tragedy of Enclosures

Beginning with Garrett Hardin's classic example of shepherds who share a field to graze their flocks, but unwittingly cause the land to be overused and degraded the idea of scarcity through over consumption has been called a tragedy of the commons. There are countless instances of openly accessed resources becoming vulnerable to encroachment and misuse, leading to acute social or ecological problems. Yet Elinor Ostrom and others have shown that failed commons are not inevitable. When local users communicate, build trust, and organize to create rules to govern how their resources should be used, they can protect their commons from overuse in the interest of the common good.

So the primary challenge facing the world is not one of failed commons. Rather, it's a tragedy of enclosures the legalization of private property and commodity exchange by the state, and the transference and overuse of commonly managed resources by the marketplace. the history of the privatization of capital and natural resources is well known. Beginning in the 12th century in northern Europe, and intensifying during the 16th century, the emerging free market laid claim to what seemed to be an endless supply of natural resources existing in empty and limitless space. Enterprising merchants, bankers and politicians enclosed these 'vacant' areas and turned them into legally titled property. Over the past several centuries, similar enclosure movements have spread across the world, subjugating and extracting resources which were previously unownable, fully accessible and often governed by local custom. Under the system of property rights and sovereign boundaries that has evolved, resource managers (public sector) and producers and providers (private sector) are kept distinctly separate from resource users (commoners). These social divisions produce and reproduce the modern institutional norms of economic management and the creation of market value through profit and interest, which are said to be the basis of dynamic social progress and economic growth. But through this process of wealth creation, poor and native peoples have been evicted from their villages and lands and displaced from their means of subsistence, while customary rights and traditions over resources are criminalized. The history of enclosures is a legacy of struggle and violence over rightful claims to property, which continues today.

Global Common Goods

Perhaps what we are anticipating, but have been unable to define because of society's pervasive commitment to free markets in driving global economic integration and to sovereign reciprocity in making global decisions, is the idea of global common goods the shared resources that fall outside the domains of both private and public goods. The commons exist at the intersection of society and nature and are expressed in many contexts of life. They include a wide diversity of collectively inherited or produced resources belonging to all human beings equally. These commons whether local, state, interstate, regional or global in scope connect us to the things we share and need to survive on all levels of human activity. Yet, because 'the commons' are not part of our everyday vocabulary or worldview, they are often unrecognized. We have to refocus our conditioned mental categories to recognize the broad range of commons that exist all around and within us (Figure 1).

Some of these resources cultural, social and intellectual are renewable. Many others natural, genetic and material resources are not (or may be replenishable at very slow rates). At first glance, such differences may seem trivial. Yet the modern economic interpretation of these differences that various commons are more or less replenishable has led to our civilization wide crisis. The prevailing assumption by state capitalism that the natural, genetic and material world is infinitely replenishable, and that any scarcities of non-renewable resources can be managed through the price system, has led to the market imperative of unlimited economic growth. It's provided the 'empirical' and ideological justifications for the profit motive, speculation, capital accumulation, unrealistic levels of production and consumption, misallocated resources, debt, unemployment, inequality, boom-bust cycles, global competition for resources and exploitation of the world's poor.

That doctrine is now being challenged by people outside of the private and public sectors through their reintegration of the various types of commons. In transcending the polarized relationship between business and government, this commons movement is emerging as a potent counterforce to state capitalism. It represents a consciously organized third sector, including citizens as co-managers and co-producers in the shared management and preservation of their own resources.

The commons are not just resources but the sets of relationships they create, including the communities that use them, and the cultural and social practices and property regimes that manage them. They represent the common responsibility of people to protect and sustain their valuable common goods. But unlike local common goods, which have a familiar legacy of ownership, global common goods have yet to be defined clearly in terms of their interconnectedness, common history and planetary rights. Participatory rules and institutions have not been fully developed for cross-border commons including outer space and the atmosphere, the oceans and sea-beds, world food supplies and water sources, population growth and migration, technology and media, and trade and finance. It's clear that human society needs to build a much deeper awareness and stronger identity between its local and global commons. The decision-making, social cohesion and collective wealth implicit in common goods must be able to scale up and down. Local commons groups need the technical support and knowledge of a commons-based multilateralism; yet multilateral rules and institutions must also embody the expertise and skills of community groups based on decisions made at the grassroots.

Ultimately, the governance and production of common goods, both locally and transnationally, will shift the emphasis of government away from the sanctioning of private industry. It will redirect this power and authority in two directions upward toward the sanctioning of the international commons under a restructured multilateralism, and downward toward the sanctioning of local commons by the world's citizens under widespread com- mons agreements. To create scale-free commons, local and global commons groups must share a commitment not to exploit the scarcity-value of depletable resources. As a result, the focus of the private sector will also move away from devaluing commons resources as unaccountable external costs, and businesses will adopt a framework of property management and value that refi‚ects a more accurate measure of the actual costs of resource production.

Co-Governance

Until the modern era of enclosure and commodification, com- munities had always made up their own rules for creating and maintaining local resources. Unlike the world's public and private sectors, commoners have broad experience in the supervision and sustenance of living systems to ensure equitable ways of sharing their uses and benefits. This knowledge which is still held and practiced by many indigenous peoples and community groups is now being rediscovered. People across the world are returning to the transparent stewardship of their local commons and becoming involved as providers as well as recipients of resources, goods and services. Now, however, the commons involves more than just the stewardship of natural and material resources: modern technologies have also created a new generation of cultural commons with unique forms of participation and social capital. Co-governance involves the principle of subsidiarity taking decisions at the lowest possible level of authority and creating new checks and balances on the overall decision-making activities of the state. The inclusion of people in the decisions that directly afi€ect them formalizes the process of just governance and democratic oversight by closing the gap between resource users and resource managers, producers and providers. Co-governance thus entails the development of non-centralized rules and institutions pertaining to the major questions of access, control, use and distribution of the wealth generated on a commons. These activities evolve out of the shared meaning and values of the stakeholders who depend upon a resource for their survival and well-being. The sharing of duties and decision-making over the use, protection and replenishment of a particular resource therefore requires personal and group qualities such as moral responsibility, reciprocity, trust, mutual aid, fellowship and cooperation.

The kinds of expertise and understanding that people have developed through the local management of resources must be scaled up to the global level. Incentives for sharing the global commons need to be built into multilateral rules and institutions. By the same token, local development needs an international support system that is generative in purpose not technocratic, nationalistic or commercial. It's really not global governance that is required, but global co-governance. This mutual governance would involve independent states giving regulatory legitimacy and authority to global institutions through international standards for the management and protection of global common goods. Initially, these common goods could be created through a cooperative system for managing long-term risks, such as degradation of Earth's living systems, global climate change, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, trade protectionism, security of global supplies, threats of fragile and failed states, and unequal representation of developing nations in global decision-making.

Co-Production

While co-governance brings together resource users and managers, co-production involves the collaboration of resource users and resource producers and providers through open social networks. Increasingly, traditional social divisions between produc- tion and reproduction of commons resources are disappearing and unique forms of social and cultural meaning are emerging. Many people are finding new identity and significance through sharing information, seeking consensus-based solutions, keeping value in their communities, and distributing the benefits that arise from the use of commons resources. Countless hub-culture communities are forming, not only on the internet, but also through local, regional and global organizations (Figure 2).

A notable development in many of these networked relationships is the free labor and creativity that are generated without financial incentives or rewards. When users are directly involved in the production and delivery of goods and services, they develop cooperative skills, knowledge and wealth beyond the constraints of extractive profits, patents, trademarks, copyrights, traditional ownership, paid work, commodity values and other value-added measures. Social production thus entails not only new forms of property management, but also a difi€erent measure of value. This new capital based on communication, care, respect, validation, cooperation, common welfare and transparent decision-making is reframing the political debate on commons resource management and the direct production of social and cultural wealth.

As mentioned, the idea of 'global public goods' created by sovereign nations is really a non-sequitur since there is no international framework corresponding to domestic public government which is designed to manage resources for the people of the world as a whole. But we are recognizing that another form of global goods social innovation, networked collaboration, collective action, voluntary associations, peer support networks and multi-stakeholder participation is being created at the international level. It's possible that the co-production of global common goods can now be facilitated through direct collaboration between local resource users and multilateral institutions, where service users become involved in the mutual support and delivery of goods and services. The creation of a global resource pool entails an entirely new phase of multilateralism, in which nations collectively agree to preserve and protect the various commons of Earth and maintain a pool of shared production and goods large enough to provide for everyone's needs. In giving up a portion of their sovereignty, rich nations would recycle their excess resources through this global clearinghouse, which would then be redistributed to poor nations needing assistance. The resources required for production and the goods that are produced would go into this common pool, and the goods which people consume or use would come from it.

Social Charters

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees to every person the freedom from want and fear. This is a good beginning. Yet because human rights are dependent on government to legitimate them, the UN Declaration does not redirect the source of these rights away from sovereign governments to the sovereign people of a particular commons. As global citizens, regardless of national obligations, we have a responsibility to engage in areas of community and transborder action where the state and private sectors have little jurisdiction, authority or experience. Commons rights difi€er from human rights and civil rights because they arise, not through the legislation of a state, but through a customary or emerging identification with an ecology, a cultural resource area, a social need, or a form of collective labor. Commons rights afiƒrm the sovereignty of human beings over their means of sustenance and well-being. They vest us with a moral authority and social legitimacy to make decisions and create agreements on the sharing of resources that ensure our rights to survival and security.

This creates an entirely new context for collective action. Instead of seeking individual and human rights from the state, people may begin to claim long-term authority over resources, governance and social value as their planetary birthrights both at a community and global level. Commons rights provide an important basis for creating covenants and institutions that are not state-managed to negotiate the protection and sustenance of resources and ensure that the mutual interests of all stakeholders are directly represented. Through the assertion of people's inherent rights to a commons, the role of the state would become much more balanced between enabling the corporate sector and enabling citizens. Instead of regulating commerce and finance in the public interest (while also regulating the commons for the benefit of commerce and finance), the new duty of the state would be to confirm the declarations of the rights of people to their commons, allowing them to manage their own resources by recognizing and upholding their social charters and commons trusts.

A social charter is a social and institutional framework providing incentives for the management and protection of commons resources. Creating a social charter requires the support and involvement of people across a region or community of interest who depend on specific common goods for their livelihood and welfare. A social charter can be developed for a single commons or for overlapping commons (Figure 1).

Given the uniqueness of every commons, there is no universal template for social charters but a baseline is emerging. A social charter for a commons should include, at minimum, a summary of traditional or emerging claims to legitimacy; a declaration of the rights and entitlements of users and producers; a code of ethics; elaboration of common values and standards; a statement of benefits; a notice of claims to reparations or re-territorialization of boundaries; and a practical framework for cooperation. Democratic and transparent decision-making for the maintenance and preservation of a particular commons would be developed through the collective action of citizens, customary representatives, social networks, academics, scientists, bilateral donors, development partners, regional organizers, intergovernmental organizations, media and other stakeholders with limited input from national governments and the private sector. Citizens who create a social charter thus ensure that administrative power is decentralized in order to maintain community access to and sovereignty over their own commons.

Commons Trusts

While social charters ensure a broad political foundation for the co-governance and co-production of common property regimes, they do not make them operational. That requires the development of commons trusts, which establish the specific legal conditions for people to help each other manage and produce what each of them needs. Land and forest trusts are familiar examples. Commons trusts are institutions, usually involving both physical and financial assets, which preserve and manage resources inherited from past generations on behalf of present and future generations. By definition, commons trusts are the only fiduciary institutions accountable for the long-term preservation and sustenance of a resource. That's because neither of our existing property regimes private nor public have a mandate to provide fair access and long-term protection for critical resources. Under its current operational rules and institutions, state capitalism has forsaken such long-term fiscal responsibility by neglecting to keep the actual value of the commons separate from the mainstream economy. This commingling of accounts is why, under the present system, the private and public sectors are spending both the 'principal' and the 'interest' of the commons leading to currency volatility and boom-bust cycles, and contributing enormously to the planet's ecological, energy and political instability.

The creation of commons trusts allows the private and public sectors to continue to focus on profit, investment and budgetary appropriations, while the commons becomes a primary means of stabilizing the principal of commons reserves to maintain the diversity and sustainability of the overall economy. Commons trustees have two functions. First, they have a responsibility to decide what proportion of their commons resources should be monetized by renting them to the private sector for extraction and production. A percentage of this resource rent would then be distributed to citizens by the state as dividends (or used for other purposes such as maintenance of the commons goods which are being rented, or mitigation of the negative efi€ects of renting these goods). Commons trusts thus guarantee that those who are unprotected have rights to basic sustenance from their own resources. Yet the needs of present beneficiaries are a secondary responsibility. The primary obligation of trust managers is to keep the value created through the commons within the commons to the extent possible, so that the community can hold in reserve the larger portion of its natural, genetic, and material stock for the benefit of people and species yet unborn, while generating cultural, social and intellectual capital for current generations. In this way, the harmful efi€ects of state capitalism are rebalanced: private industry fi‚ourishes from the surplus resources which are rented from commons trusts, the socially marginalized and vulnerable receive a subsistence income from the state, and the primary assets of the commons are preserved and regenerated. This dynamic equilibrium is achieved through new temporal modalities in the system of multilateral co-governance and co-production introduced through the creation of commons trusts across the world (Figure 3).

In this emerging multilateral system, the financial incentives of businesses and government continue to operate as before. But the difi€erence now is that the long-term wealth guaranteed by commons trusts is not generated through the potential financial revenue of the commons assets they are managing. Instead of regarding these commons as a source of profit, commons trusts determine their intrinsic worth (the actual value of passing on what we have inherited to future generations and allowing this stock to be replenished and restored) through the full participatory choice of citizens on whether or not to spend this commons capital. Commons trusts thus create a new time signature based on the preservation of commons resources and the resilience of the system that manages and produces them not on the assets of the commons that may have financial value in the marketplace. Hence, long-term wealth arises, not through consumer demand, investment or capital accumulation, but in the enhancement of the carrying capacity of the global commons to support life and life systems, expressed through sustainable choice.

Broadly speaking, the creation of local commons trusts worldwide entails three significant changes:

• government shifts its primary emphasis from issuing corporate charters and licensing the private sector to approving social charters and open licenses for resource preservation and cultural and social production through commons trusts

• commons trusts exercise a fiduciary duty to preserve natural, genetic and material commons but can decide to rent a proportion of these resource rights to businesses

• businesses may rent the rights to extract and produce a resource from a commons trust, creating profits and positive externalities through innovation, competitive products and services, and ad- justment of the market to the actual costs of resources

Commons Reserve Currency

Under the present economic system, money is created by national governments and private banks through loans. To maintain the supply of money needed to repay both the interest and principal on these loans, banks must continually find new credit applicants to create sufiƒcient demand for more loans. Hence, banks are continually pushing credit, driving corporations to borrow more to produce, and citizens to borrow more to consume. This is our global dilemma. On one hand, no amount of corporate production and consumer spending can satisfy the banks' continual demands for repayment of these loans; on the other, the algorithm of perpetual economic growth adopted by banks, corporations and consumers has no ofi€setting formula for repaying the accumulating debt and redeeming the damage that this compulsive growth is wreaking on the commons. In terms of non-renewable resources such as oil as well as many other renewable resources human society has been spend- ing not only the interest but significant portions of the principal. If we do not reverse this situation if bank-driven overproduction and overconsumption continue to generate speculation and hoarding of physical and financial assets, loan defaults and job losses, hunger and poverty, and carbon emissions and climate change soon the planet will not only have diminishing returns from the interest on its commons resources, but the principal itself will be gone.

Since the money system and individual purchasing power are social commons, perhaps there is a way to both stabilize and democratize money. The world community could create a form of monetary reference belonging and accountable to everyone that is not dependent on the economic or political decisions of a single state or the monetary nationalism of currency-issuing states. Global commons representatives could collaborate to produce an international currency, backed by a new kind of reserve asset, to provide a stable and usable exchange credit for business, trade and other social transactions. This new system would generate a broad measure of common wealth and well-being that is not based on productivity, profit or interest, but on the perpetual vitality and continuous adaptation of local resources to support a good quality of life for all human beings. It would mean turning the present system of private credit including banking and finance into a commons utility through the conversion of debt to equity across all sectors of society. It would mean using our commons-based capital cultural, social, intellectual, natural, genetic, and material as collateral for an equity-based global reserve system that issues credit underpinned by these resources.

Under this new reserve system, commons assets would form the basis of a composite standard of value. For example, a Reserve Basket of Global Common Goods could include indicators for cultural resources such as indigenous wisdom, household work and the arts; social resources such as health, literacy, economic output and income distribution; intellectual resources such as scientific knowledge, intellectual property and information fi‚ows; natural resources such as air and water quality, ecosystem health and biological diversity; genetic resources such as living creatures, organs and seeds; and material resources such as minerals, water and the atmosphere. Rather than convert commons assets into a market value, these indicators would generate a unique index

based on the sustainability of the global commons and the value that these common goods have for our natural and social quality of life and that of future generations. Resource units in this reserve index would include historically important depletable resources, and also resources that are currently depletable and are likely to be depletable in the future. But it would also include resources that are replenishable and refi‚ect social productivity, human security and well-being. By continually measuring and averaging the indices of each resource in this basket, trustees of the commons reserve system could decide the proportion of those commons resources that should remain untapped as principal. At the same time, the commons reserve system would replace the present interest rate mechanism with a sustainability rate (Figure 4).

This commons reserve currency would function through the creation of co-credit a participatory unit of value used in trading, in- vestment and decision-making. As co-credits are lost or gained in each transaction, the deficit or surplus would be accounted with reference to the sustainability rate a real-time measure refi‚ecting the capacity of the global commons to provide and sustain the well-being of present and future generations. At any given moment, if the sustainability rate is low, the co-credit is worth less relative to its value in an exchange, which may cause a buyer to spend less, or perhaps not spend or to postpone spending; and if the sustainability rate is higher, the co-credit will be worth more in the exchange, which may convince the buyer to spend more. So, through co-credit exchange among buyers and sellers, community members would determine the value of their own production based on the capacity of the global commons to support the natural and social quality of life. Each use of a co-credit (whether the sustainability rate is low or high) is literally a vote for the longevity, regeneration and diversity of the planet's common goods, enabling human civilization to protect its principal and withdraw from the commons a smaller portion of its resources. Since the commons reserve system guarantees a stable and lasting source of global capital, the development of co-credit exchange would eliminate the need for banks, financial institutions, government issued currency, and a debt based money system in which the continual payment of interest on loans requires unsustainable levels of production and consumption to monetize the existing debt.

Global Common Wealth

Endless economic growth is crashing against the limits of Earth's vital systems. In coming years, the recovery of our suppressed commons as a source of participative governance and non-monetized value will become critical as the private and public sectors search for a way out of the current global economic, energy and ecological crises. It's a challenging puzzle:

• we cannot end the financial crisis without a new monetary system

• we cannot create a new monetary system without creating long-term incentives for solving the ecological and energy crises

• we cannot create long-term incentives to solve the ecological and energy crises without a low carbon system of production and trade

• we cannot create a low carbon system of production and trade without a new multilateral system of governance

• we cannot create a new multilateralism without a total redefinition of wealth

A New Story of Global Common Wealth is emerging. Imagine a world ... where businesses thrive. Governments evolve power upward to an international trusteeship for the commons, giving up a portion of their sovereignty through new global standards of cooperation, trust and shared values. Government authority also shifts downward to citizens and their commons organizations through social charters. Local commons trusts organize and affliate with each other across the world, providing independent checks and balances on the power of global corporations, sovereign governments and multilateral institutions. Global co-governance creates the means for a systematic redistribution of global common goods. Cultural and social production preserves resources and generates new wealth, alongside but independent of the private production of wealth. A commons reserve currency available through co-credits enables humanity to base its economic transactions directly on the sustainability and resilience of the global commons. And world society creates a dynamic equilibrium between (private) property rights, (public) sovereign rights, and (commons) sustainability rights through a new multi-lateral system of co-governance and co-production, transcending the dichotomies of state capitalism and transforming life across the planet.

The chart shows the global context of commons trusts through an example - a Sky Trust for clean air, climate wealth and security.

by James Bernard Quilligan

The Market State and the Liquidation of Biophysical Capital

The term commons was first used during the enclosure period in Britain when people were removed from their communal lands. Since then, commons have come to represent areas of cogovernance and co-production that lie outside of the market and state sectors (or Market State), including food, water, clean air, energy, information, internet, culture, indigenous peoples' rights and other concerns. The recent failures of the Doha Round of world trade talks, the UN Conference on the global economic crisis and the Copenhagen Summit on climate change have brought the commons into sharper focus. Since these community-managed resources are a primary source of economic, social and creative value, could they provide a meta-level context for global negotiations? Commons have different meanings, of course, because we associate them with different levels of scale. At community and regional levels, the commons are largely a territorial concept involving the local appropriation, use and benefit of a particular property; at the global level, it's more of a functional concept involving sovereign resource management rather than questions of use and benefit. But the increasing openness of political systems and interconnectivity of economies and information networks has created new possibilities for multi-level management of the commons, requiring principles and linkages that reach from the local levels of social and political organization to higher levels of multilateral governance.

Sections:

The Market State and the Liquidation of Biophysical Capital

How did this happen?

History's Legal Tautology: Res Nullius Vs. Res Communis

Today's Superbubble: Surplus Vs. Deficit Nations

Tomorrow's Great Adjustment: Renewable Vs. Depletable Resources

Planetary Non-Dualism: From North-South Dialogue to Transborder Metalogue

Beyond the Pairs of Opposites: Commons Sovereignty as Global Natural Law

This article focuses on why the international community has been unable to bring the full range of commons issues and their representatives into strategic discussions. It calls for a new framework of global interaction and dialogue based on natural law. To create this metalogue on the global commons, world society must engage in a kind of non-dualism: a recognition that the various beliefs, qualities, or practices which appear separate are actually part of the same phenomena. As on the individual level of consciousness and being where the 'mind-body split' is healed through introspection, global non-polarity will also require collective self-inquiry, dialogue and reconciliation on the ontological nature of world community. Ontology means being present. If global citizens, their representatives and institutions are sourcing the vast potentials of their mental, natural and physical commons, this would be a significant step toward global non-polarity.

Bringing these various issues and representatives together on a global scale: which has never been done: is one dimension. But even when major conferences are held on single issues, they tend to leave out the non-quantitative (i.e., undervalued) aspects of the commons, which represent the real dispersion of human power in the world. It isn't that this intersubjectivity is entirely missing, but that it is still underrepresented and repressed in multilateral negotiations. As indicated in Figure 1, the noosphere (consciousness), expressed through the economic ideology of the Market State, has dissociated from the biosphere (life, nature, biology) and the physiosphere (physical matter). This imbalance did not emanate from the biophysical world, but in the human mind. In earlier times, value emerged from the biological resources, physical utilities and human labor of a community, and living close to these sources of life and sustenance created social trust, stability and cohesion. In recent centuries, as industrial civilization was forged by extracting and burning up these assets, biophysical value has gradually become a mental abstraction, a rational coefficient. Through the economic growth imperative which fuels the conversion of finite resources into money and commodities, the collective mind is repressing its own organic and material roots, decoupling the economy from its underlying sources of resilience and survival and creating countless side-effects that threaten human and animal life and the greater health of the planet.

Figure 1 Dissociation of the Commons

Noosphere (Social, Cultural & Intellectual) - political and economic ideology, indigenous culture and traditions, community support systems, neighborhoods, social connectedness, voluntary associations, labor relations, women and children's rights, family life, health, education, sacredness, religions, ethnicity, racial values, recreation, silence, creative works, languages, words, numbers, symbols, holidays, calendars, stores of human knowledge and wisdom, scientific knowledge, ethnobotanical knowledge, ideas, intellectual property, data, information, billboards, communication flows, airwaves, internet, free culture, sports, games, playgrounds, roads, streets, parking, sidewalks, plazas, public spaces, national parks, historical sites, museums, libraries, universities, music, dance, arts, crafts, money, purchasing power  

Biosphere (Natural & Genetic) - soil, agriculture, fisheries, wilderness, trees, forests, wetlands, ecosystems, pastures, parks, gardens, plants, seeds, algae, topsoil, food crops, photosynthesis, pollination, life forms, species

Physiosphere (Material & Solar) - rocks, minerals, metals, chemicals, hyrdocarbons, technology, hardware, buildings, the elements, solar energy, wind energy, tides, hydropower, beaches, oceans, lakes, springs, streams, watersheds, aquifers, land, inorganic energy, atmosphere, ozone layer, stratosphere

How did this happen?

It's well known that the Scientific Revolution brought about a clear differentiation between biology and physics: a recognition that the physical world provides the basic conditions for the biological. It demonstrated that the organic realm is moving upward in evolution into greater differentiation, structural order and complexity, while many (though not all) components of the physical realm are gradually moving in the opposite direction, dissipating into chaos. The fact that life and matter are playing different evolutionary roles also provided a new basis for the social management of property. During the Middle Ages, the lands, resources and labor that were not part of the feudal system were shared by people through culture and custom. As ideology replaced theology during the 14th-17th centuries, divine hierarchies, kingly sovereignty, and feudal governance structures were displaced. Just as the biosphere and physiosphere had been differentiated, it was also clear that the conscious agent making this separation was the noosphere: rational consciousness was differentiating itself from the biophysical. Critical thought, rationality, freedom and democracy began to define human life. The emerging ideas of economic and political individualism led political philosophers to conclude that, just as the mind 'owns' the body, a person has the right to own property. With this rationalist basis for contractual property, traditional rights to common property were overthrown.

Yet the intoxicating premise of the Market State: that the noosphere is not part of the biosphere: suppressed the fact that Earth functions as a living organism and that the biosphere is actually a vital part of the noosphere. This has created a profound contradiction. On one hand, the historic schism of biology and physics advanced the cause of scientific progress, industrial production, capital accumulation and national governance structures, and much of world civilization took a great leap forward. On the other hand, the conscious ideology of economic growth provided a rationale for the endless borrowing and massive appropriation of commons resources. The extraction and production of commodity and monetary value from the Earth and from social labor have effectively separated human consciousness, community and culture from nature and matter.

History's Legal Tautology: Res Nullius Vs. Res Communis

A standard definition of the commons does not apply at all levels of social, political and economic organization. Many local commons are deeply embedded in their own cultural, historical, economic and political structures, while the global commons is still an evolving concept. As noted in Figure 2, local commons emphasize the ownership or management of a territory of goods: involving the principles of exclusion (some persons may be prevented from using a good); non-exclusion (no one can be prevented from using a good); rivalness (the use of a good by one person reduces its use for others); and non-rivalness (the use of a good by one person does not affect its use by others).

Global commons emphasize the functional use of resources beyond national borders where local principles have less significance because of the state-centric international laws governing the various resource domains across borders. Given these different assumptions, multi-governance and institutional linkages for the commons do not yet scale up (or down) from the community to the regional and international levels.

Historically, the legal basis for the global commons: in public trust doctrine, public domain, human rights, national constitutions, and international treaties, protocols and conventions: has been circumscribed by the liberal constraints of state sovereignty, which emphasize the management of a territory and the consent of the governed within it. Hence, through the consent-based international law of sovereign nations, all claims on the commons, whether inside or outside of state borders, must be approved by each state as a nominal member of the larger community of states. But this is problematic. Whether inside or outside of state borders, if people derive their rights to a commons from natural law and view government as an interloper: a fictitious entity holding property which is entrusted to humanity: then these liberal legal claims may be challenged.

The historical rights to local commons have their basis in customary law. Prior to the Market State, property use was heavily influenced by custom and culture, and in many communities, established norms of behavior, rights or responsibilities acquired the force of law. Customary law is sometimes confused with public domain law. While customary law emphasizes the social and cultural limitations of commons management, public domain is focused more on the unrestricted use of public goods through civil law. Public domain had its origins in the ancient Roman concepts of res nullius and res communis. Res nullius refers to things that have not been made into property and have no owner: for example, untamed animals and abandoned lands. Res communis, on the other hand, refers to things that are common to everyone, though they may be in a wild, unappropriated state, like forests and oceans. There is a significant difference between the two principles. Under res nullius, common goods cannot be owned by anyone. Under res communis, 'ownership by everyone' is based, not on community, but on the self-interest of each member of the community, which means that ownership of 'common property' may be licensed to a private individual or group.

The voyages of Columbus, Magellan and other explorers demonstrated the apparently limitless expanse of the world and its inexhaustible resources. As global sea trade escalated in the early 17th century, the Netherlands became involved in a shipping dispute: but there were no legal precedents pertaining to international waters. The concept of the in?nite extent of nature entered the modern legal canon through the work of Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius. Rather than use the customary laws of land and community, based on social obligations between commoners and landlords, Grotius developed his doctrine of unrestricted open access to the high seas especially for government and commercial representatives involved in extraterritorial relations. In his 1609 book, the Free Sea, Grotius argued that because the seas belong to no one and are ungovernable, they can be claimed as an area of open access for everyone. Since the world beyond national territories was in?nite and unaccountable (res nullius), he reasoned, then these new areas were open to public management (res communis).

Grotius's proposals were reinterpreted through the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, when the structure of the nation-state was formally adopted. The rising nations of Europe had already been using res nullius and res communus selectively. They invoked res nullius within their foreign colonies through the principle of terra nullius, or land belonging to no one. This doctrine gave sovereign nations a legal justi?cation to ignore the traditional claims of those who inhabited non-sovereign territories. Denied their natural rights, indigenous peoples were driven o? their lands by foreigners determined to exploit their labor and resources for trade. International law thus allowed modern states to circumvent the customary laws of local commons and pursue their expansionary interests through wars, colonization, slavery and the unequal distribution of commons resources.

Meanwhile, beyond their colonial boundaries, the new European states employed an extended version of Grotius's principle of res communis in international relations: the doctrine that the public property of all humanity could be guaranteed only through the sovereignty of nations which were loosely affiliated on the basis of recognizing one another's sovereignty. Res communis thus created a weak world order which precluded neighborly responsibilities of solidarity and cooperation with other states through the strong 'individualism' of national sovereignty: the self-interest of each state in guaranteeing nonexclusive use and open access to the commons. Today, under this liberal doctrine, resource areas that are shared by several nations through international treaty (such as the Mediterranean Sea and Antarctica) are considered international commons, while resource areas which are open to all nations (oceans, seabeds, atmosphere) are considered global commons. By assuring everyone the unrestricted access to areas that fall outside of national jurisdictions, state oficials can claim that 'the commons belong to everyone' through public domain and open access. To the modern ear, the concepts 'public' and 'open' have a ring of democratic inclusiveness, but this is a hollow promise: resource areas such as world fisheries, the atmosphere and outer space are heavily restricted through sovereign treaties and conventions. Hence, collective decision-making, which is frequently based in natural or customary law on the local commons, rests entirely upon consent-based, sovereign law at the global level. As long as the customary principles of exclusion, non-exclusion, rivalness and non-rivalness are superseded by the modern right of sovereign states to manage the commons beyond national borders, broadly shared governance and equal access to the global commons are not realizable. This neglect of effective global commons management has resulted in many international imbalances.

Today's Superbubble: Surplus Vs. Deficit Nations

From the time of Grotius through the Second World War, nations continued to view the global commons as res communis through international liberal law. During the post-war period, many colonial nations achieved political independence from their ruling countries, yet still found themselves reliant on the world's rich nations for economic assistance. The 1944 Bretton Woods conference promised a multilateral system in which foreign assistance and loans would flow from rich to poor nations, and all would adjust their payments balances for mutual benefit. But there was a flaw in the Bretton Woods framework: different structural incentives for nations with current account deficits and surpluses (deficit or surplus in a current account measures a nation's income relative to its spending and indicates whether it is mostly saving or borrowing from abroad). Under the terms of the Bretton Woods agreement, the International Monetary Fund has legal powers to ensure that deficit nations adjust their fiscal balances and pay their debts, but there is no reciprocal mechanism requiring surplus nations to make adjustments and recycle their trade surpluses and currency reserves. (The exception is the United States, which is a deficit nation but is not immediately forced to adjust its fiscal balances because of its reserve currency.)

Two mutually dependent models of economic development and growth have resulted. There is the model of export growth, oversaving and under-consumption in many Asian nations like China and Japan, as well as Germany and the petrodollar states; and the model of cheap imports, low-cost foreign loans, and debt-financed consumption in nations like the United States and the United Kingdom. Essentially, surplus nations are encouraged to build up savings of foreign reserves and withdraw these export earnings from circulation, leaving potential purchasing power idle rather than using it to buy the products of nations with trade deficits. Because the IMF is unable to link global capacity with global demand, the global economy must depend on deficit nations to sustain their global demand for the surplus output of the rest of the world.

With no way of stabilizing the world's widening trade imbalances, distorted growth and misaligned exchange rates, a monetary superbubble has developed between surplus and deficit nations.

Can this imbalance be reconciled? A far-reaching proposal was put forward by John Maynard Keynes in 1941. He suggested a negative interest rate on international trade and exchange which would automatically increase the circulation of money for lending and investment. Creditors would be required to pay interest periodically on their holdings of surplus international currency in the same way that debtors pay interest on their loans. Thus, each nation would be obliged annually to clear its accounts and maintain a neutral balance, preventing the accumulation of surpluses or deficits. Unfortunately, Keynes' proposal would not adjust today's superbubble. Negative interest rates used to balance interest rates may eliminate compound growth, debt and inflation, and increase the velocity of money, but this in itself would not realign market prices with the underlying value of social and ecological goods and services. As long as the locus of demand is still measured in market prices rather than in the intrinsic value of social labor, income, wages, purchasing power, and natural and physical resources, the current patterns of overproduction and overconsumption and the competitive pressures on the Earth, its ecosystems, human labor and social creativity will continue. It's not the utility value or demand for goods and services that is key in ensuring stable currency value. What is crucial is the preservation value which underlies that demand, not as a capital asset or commodity-based currency, but as an intrinsic store of wealth that resists devaluation.

What Keynes was probably envisioning was a commons of global financial liquidity in which inflow and outflow are in balance, creating a state of dynamic equilibrium. It is useful, therefore, to consider the international financial adjustment process through system dynamics, in which dynamic behavior arises when a flow accumulates in a stock and is later recycled as a flow. (This meaning of stock is not the same as the capital account of a business security.) In system dynamics, stock is a quantity of something that exists at a single point in time, as opposed to a flow which is measured over a period of time. To use a familiar example: a bathtub accumulates a stock of water, while the activity in its faucet and drainpipe represent flows into and out of the tub. The stock increases if the inflow is greater than the outflow; and the stock decreases when the outflow is greater than the inflow. In terms of current accounts, surpluses are like stocks, and deficits are like flows (this is a generalization, since surplus and deficit each has its own forms of accumulation, inflows and outflows, but it is a fair illustration of the broad pattern of balance-of-payments among nations). The point is that stocks are not bound by time, while flows are time-dependent. This makes stocks persistent and inert: stopping the inflow to a stock means that the stock will stay at the same level unless the outflow increases. These dynamics are present in the superbubble created by the Bretton Woods system, where the time variables for stocks and flows differ significantly

(Figure 3)

Market forces do not adjust the structural distortions between current accounts, because stocks (trade and capital surpluses), inflows (trade, finance, debt payments) and outflows (trade, finance, aid, loans) vary widely, creating timelags in the liquidity of money and exchange of goods and services. Instability in the global financial system is the result of a structural flaw in which the intrinsic value of commons resources are measured only through effective demand when it is registered in the marketplace: even though the time-bound flows of that demand may be widely disconnected from the recurrent stocks of supply. A major international adjustment is needed to clear the superbubble that has resulted from these different timeframes and incentives in the balance-of-payment system which allows surplus nations to accumulate financial assets without recycling them, while requiring deficit nations to pay their debts and reconcile their fiscal balances. This adjustment between the stocks and flows of the world's national current accounts must be accomplished by counterposing the interest rate with a long-term mechanism for sustainability, not with a negative interest rate.

Tomorrow's Great Adjustment: Renewable Vs. Depletable Resources

Since the 18th century, economists have argued that vesting power in the individual through property ownership helps prevent aggressive market forces from resulting in excessive exploitation and inefficient production of scarce resources. This may have been a useful strategy during the past few centuries when market products were relatively scarce and natural resources were relatively abundant. But now, it's the reverse: goods and services produced by nature have become scarcer and more valuable, while goods and services produced by people have become more plentiful and less valuable. Yet we still have the same system for managing scarcity and generating profits as in former times, using the same two principles for adding value to commons resources. First, the market takes renewable resources like information, ideas, languages, codes and music, which are not limited as a raw input of production and may not generate an adequate price because of their abundance, and makes them artificially scarce through restrictive property regimes like patents, trademarks and copyrights. The rationale is that innovation, financial development and public wealth will be generated by exclusionary property rights and scarcity: even through proprietary claims on renewable resources result in massive inefficiencies by suppressing innovation, creativity, productivity, access, culture and civic life. Second, economic production requires a steady chain of material and natural resources, which are components of the underlying physical materials and ecosystems that support life. To extract their value, the economy treats these depletable resources, which are limited as a raw input of production, as though they are essentially limitless by holding commodity prices artificially low to increase the rate of consumption. Yet the input of raw materials from the environment and the output of wastes from the economy undermine the resilience and diversity of the very physical resources, life-forms and ecosystems upon which the economy depends for the reproduction of capital. This misalignment in the market incentives of renewable and depletable resources has created deep discrepancies between the interests of private capital accumulation and natural preservation and social production.

This is reflected in the superbubble behind:

- the stocks and flows of economic products

- the stocks and flows in the current accounts of nations that produce, trade and finance these products

- the stocks and flows of labor, material resources and ecosystems from which these goods are extracted and produced

Since ecological and social production are both necessary for human livelihood, well-being and survival, the intrinsic value of the commons transcends the imputed value expressed through the constraints of private property, state sovereignty and traditional economic measures. It is the task of international negotiators to treat renewable and depletable resources as part of this broader environmental and economic continuum. Global discussions on climate change are already using the language of stocks and flows. On one side, the flows of current carbon dioxide emissions are frequently emphasized by industrialized nations. Various mechanisms have been discussed to reduce these flows, including legal penalties on present flow liabilities, which could generate funds for a global financial pool to address the problems of climate change. On the other side, the historic legacy of carbon dioxide emissions: from colonialism to industrial pollution: is generally regarded as a stock issue by nonor newly-industrializing countries. In this view, the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was created over the past two centuries and the damage is already done. These nations claim the right to follow the same path toward industrialization as others before them, while being compensated for the previous buildup of carbon stock. Proposals to adjust the stock of past damage in the name of social and ecological justice include development, aid, investment, global stimulus, climate wealth funds and reparations.

From the broader perspectives of intergenerational and interspecies justice, such measures fall short because there is no reciprocal mechanism for enforcing a dynamic equilibrium between ecological and material stocks and their inflows and outflows. Negotiators cannot reconcile these structural imbalances because present market measures are not adequate in aligning international carbon credits and deficits with the broader global inflows and outflows of greenhouse gases. Proprietary ownership, market pricing, interest rates, climate bonds, carbon credits and sovereign regulations do not create transformational incentives commensurate with the scope of the problem and cannot clear the superbubble resulting from the different objectives and timeframes between the financial and credit exchanges of nations and the realities of the planet's entropic debt. Even if we were to slow the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, for example, this would not reduce the stock that is already there: yet this has not been factored into state-to-state negotiations or market incentive schemes. When the international system is finally adjusted, it must link the stocks and flows in the current accounts between surplus and deficit nations with the stocks and flows of the global commons, including both renewable and depletable resources. This opens new vistas for global negotiations.

Planetary Non-Dualism: From North-South Dialogue to Transborder Metalogue

Since the late 1960s, various claims have been made on the common heritage of humanity. These include: seabeds (beyond coastal jurisdictions), Antarctica, the moon, satellite orbits, space communications, solar energy, endangered species, genetic resources, rain forests, atmosphere, food, ocean resources, cultural legacies, technology and commodities. The North-South dialogue on these transboundary domains was a matter of much interest during the 1970s, but has now been precluded by other factors. Although the common heritage concept originated in the global South, Northern nations have used it to their advantage, defining the commons in the Grotian tradition: a space of liberal freedom under multisovereign authority. Public domain and open access have thus been on the agenda of corporations and financial institutions seeking to exploit natural resources, and governments seeking to attain greater political leverage over other governments holding resources. Through the political cartel of the G8, and now the G20 (which is seen by some as broadening the world's decision-making to include the interests of developing nations), common heritage has been folded into the normative interests of the world's richer corporations, banks and states.

After the Second World War, the assertion of national rights to throw off the shackles of colonialism led many developing nations to insist on self-determination in the protection of their own resources. Until the 1980s, permanent sovereignty over natural resources was linked with a strong commitment to human and social development, global wealth redistribution and a new international economic order. Once the Cold War ended and the pace of globalization sped up, however, virtually all nations in Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe gravitated toward the global marketplace, not only for trade and finance, but as a primary means of fighting poverty and promoting development. Thus, for the past two decades, developed and developing nations have been acting similarly in consolidating the permanent sovereignty of their domestic commons, as well as the prohibitory management of commons beyond their borders. Essentially, a new club of major governments, from North and South, is using consent based sources of liberal international law (treaties and customary international law) to manage a restrictive global property regime of sovereign neutrality and open access, which amounts to exclusive and non-sustainable use of the global commons. Because national priorities, stemming from the sovereign right to development, determine whether natural resources may be conserved, exploited or destroyed, the global commons is left without effective measures for governance, enforcement or development.

Although civil society and social movements in many nations have been vocal about protecting world resources and the rights of the poor to development, they are mostly excluded from strategic multilateral negotiations, where the dialogue is less about allocation, use and benefit of the global commons for the common good than about the politics of international business and national security. Since the field of international development has acquired the baggage of transnational capitalism and state sovereignty, including structures of global social hierarchy, division of labor, and public-private partnerships, it is important that the kinds of development associated with the commons are clearly differentiated. Among the defenders of the commons, there is a tendency for one side to emphasize social and economic advancement, human development and creative potential, and the other to stress nature, preservation and limits to economic development. Although social production, justice and human rights may seem divergent from sustainability, conservation and the environment, in most cases they are complementary. An example is the digital technology that helps people in poor nations to manage their natural and physical commons through information, coordination, and economic and social innovation. Hence, the real issue is not the apparent dissimilarities between ecology, culture and society. The world's greatest discrepancy is between the commons and the Market State: because ecological and social production create natural wealth, ecosystems services and social cohesion: not dead commodities, unnecessary services and social disparities.

Since the collapse of the North-South dialogue, the meaning of 'development' has changed. Many developed nations are now in deficit and many developing nations are in surplus. The new political dichotomies are not always easy to pinpoint. Sometimes the polarized viewpoints still line up at international conferences as divisions between rich-poor and surplus-deficit nations. Because of the mounting biophysical debt of many surplus nations, deficit nations are questioning the legitimacy of the world's unfair balance-of-payments adjustment system. As settlement, some developing states have been seeking a 'Global Deal' to provide financial and technical assistance for development, carbon emission reductions and other environmental safeguards. But compensation for developing nations is only an interim solution. Many bargainers now recognize that major biological and physical damage to the planetary environment has occurred and that all nations are running an entropic debt. So the strategic interests that are lining up at today's global gatherings are primarily representing different sovereign and commercial positions on the stocks and flows of renewable and depletable resources. Unfortunately, this new positionality simply shifts the focus in international discussions from whether nations have surpluses or deficits to whether nations have access to a greater balance of renewables (scientific knowledge, cultural heritage, ideas, knowledge and social relationships) or depletables (ocean fisheries, soil, hyrdocarbons, water and minerals). These politics do not serve the interests of poverty reduction, sustainable development or alleviation of the planet's biophysical debt.

The North-South dialogue ended when global policy issues became more diffuse through increasing economic integration and the softening of national boundaries. Negotiations on world resources are no longer a dialogue about development issues among geographical blocs but a metalogue on cross-border problems affecting all states. Competition and comparative advantage between nations must now be refocused by expanding global discussions: making them broadly representative, cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary: to integrate the domains of global development, aid, environment, trade, finance, monetary policy, energy, climate change, human security and political security. International negotiators have an obligation to include all of these issues in the larger context of the stocks and flows of commons resources. To correct the world's burgeoning superbubble and transform the economy into a component part of the environment, the withdrawal rates of depletable resources must be slowed to allow stocks to catch up with flows, and the withdrawal rates of renewable resources equilibrated with their replenishment rates. Such adjustments would have huge significance. Integrating the stocks and flows of the economy with the stocks and flows of the environment will automatically infuse the customary principles of exclusion, non-exclusion, rivalness and non-rivalness into planetary decision-making, bringing the local and global commons fully into scale.

Beyond the Pairs of Opposites: Commons Sovereignty as Global Natural Law

The laws which govern today's international system evolved during a period when global economic and ecological interdependence was not a major factor. Our legal framework for the political and economic management of common property originated in Roman times when the entire planet held less than 300 million people; and these principles were further elaborated at the international level by Grotius when world population was around 550 million and the lands and seas of Earth were still being charted and seemed infinite in extension. The idea of imposing measures of economic growth and order on empty, limitless space may have seemed logical when the globe was much less crowded and resources more abundant. But this seems folly now that nearly 7 billion people are competing for the planet's resources. Since global integration has become the driving force in civilization, our beliefs in capital value, private property, sovereignty over resources, comparative advantage in trade, and energy independence must undergo extensive reconsideration, not unlike the time of Grotius, when the era of feudal society passed, the national state was created and international law was developed.

The ideology of the Market State holds that private property and the right to exclude others is the best way to prevent ?nite resources from being depleted or destroyed, yet legal history shows that property management is also a form of entrustment which entails the right of access to goods held in common. To protect its commons, human society must transform the state-centric legal system of absolute sovereignty and ownership. It's time to revisit res nullius in its pure form. If the world belongs to no one, as res nullius claims, then we are not its owners but its trustees. On this basis, humanity would hold the global commons in trust through a new framework of cooperation and agreement based on natural law, customary law and public trust doctrine, and all states would be under peremptory obligation to honor the governance principles of exclusion, non-exclusion, rivalness and non-rivalness. Non-polarity in the ecological and material allocation, use and benefit of common goods would thus resolve the surplus imbalances and cynical claims of res communis: the doctrine of international 'public' domain and 'open' access to the property of all humanity (which therefore needs to be managed and allocated by a few on behalf of the rest).

Internalizing the value of the commons through individual and collective accountability to the whole system of Earth will require institutional procedures and rules aligned with dynamic systems theory and evolutionary systems theory. Managing these variables across time and scale: community, regional and international: requires objectives and principles of value which apply at each level while expressing the pattern of a larger holarchy. A purposeful monetary design is needed to harmonize the divergent components of the commons, integrating the economy as a subsystem of the finite biospheric commons, with its inflows of raw materials and outflows of wastes. To make this adjustment both at the level of the algorithms of financing and debt, and at the level of stabilizing the stocks and flows of ?nite biological and material resources and renewable resources, the international community could create a sustainability rate entirely independent of market goods and services (as introduced in "People Sharing Resourcesâ€, Kosmos, fall/winter 2009). While the interest rate could continue to function in linear time for limited-term objectives (Figure 4), the sustainability rate would reflect longer-range variables, such as the alleviation of poverty, preservation of resources, elimination of climate change and pollution, maintenance of social production, production of new ideas and knowledge, reproducibility of biophysical goods and other measures of human well-being and social quality of life. With the global commons as its reserve, the value expressed through the sustainability rate in every exchange of goods and services would be secured by the resilience and diversity of the world's social, cultural, intellectual, natural, genetic, material and solar resources.

Today's global superbubble is the result of deep structural imbalances between economic ideology and policy (noosphere), and environment and labor (biosphere) and physical resources (physiosphere). The challenge is to assemble international representatives from all regions and sectors to discuss global commons issues in a negotiating format which integrates these three streams of evolution. The settlement of national current accounts with the world's biophysical imbalances requires a new monetary framework based on an understanding that the noopshere is a subsidiary of the biosphere. This can come about only through the cooperation of people acting, not as national or corporate representatives, but as representatives of present and future generations and species, so that competition becomes a strategy of collective, rather than individual, survival. When commons sovereignty is vested in humanity and life, and self-interest and common interest become part of the same holarchy of being, the dichotomies between capitalism and socialism: as well as developed and developing nations: will dissolve. Nothing will change, yet everything will change. Proponents of the free market may still assert that we all share consciousness through the price system. Environmentalists may still maintain that we all share life, and proponents of social labor may still say that we all share matter. Trustees of the global commons will say that we all share minds, life and matter, and therefore, no one may own the Earth.

Source: http://www.kosmosjournal.org/kjo2/library/kosmos-articles/the-commons-of-mind.shtml

James Bernard Quilligan is Chairman for the Secretariat of Global Commons Trust, and Chairman for Global Commons Affairs of the International Renewable Energy Organization. He has been an analyst and administrator in the field of international development for thirtyfive years and has served as a policy advisor and writer for many politicians and leaders, including Pierre Trudeau, François Mitterand, Julius Nyerere, Olof Palme, Willy Brandt, Jimmy Carter and HRH Prince El Hassan. He is a member of the Kosmos Board of Directors.

The reflections coming from many commoners, during and since the International Commons Conference in Berlin  demonstrate a depth of individual and collective thinking, sensing and reflecting, and inspire me remixing what I'm hearing. The account that follows is definitely not an objective summary of what is emerging. We have probably as many stories of the Berlin conference and its aftermath, as participants. What follows is what I see as essential through the lens that I hold to the commons. The headings reflect that sense.

Document: Some Thoughts on the Commons.
Prepared by the Steering Committee, International Commons Conference, to stimulate discussion and reflection.
(Michel Bauwens, David Bollier, Beatriz Busaniche, Silke Helfrich, Julio Lambing, Heike Löschmann) October 31, 2010

Key Thesis: Commons are the enabler for all other social goals, including environmental ones, which in essence are social.

Text

STREAM I: The Commons as a Challenge for Classical Economics

A. The commons will not succeed in challenging contemporary economics and conventional institutional design unless it:

• challenges the core beliefs of underlying conventional economics and the behavioral correlations induced by prevailing institutional designs;
• reinterprets the meaning of property from private ownership to collective stewardship; and
• develops coherent concepts that are also empirically provable and convincing alternatives to the conventional numerical "bottom lines".

B. The inherent features of the commons are abundance and diversity.

• If we respect diversity and engineer for abundance, the commons continuously (re)-produce enough for all.
• Wherever we can - in case of nonrival resources and generosity – the product of the commons should be universally available; where we cannot - in case of rival resources - the product of the commons should be equitably distributed.

C. A viable society is based on cooperation and co-production rather than the classical division of labor that separates resource producers and providers from resource users, which treats nature, community and culture as exploitable externalities.

D. Markets are not the only source of wealth creation. The commons, which are responsive to popular, democratic voices and to the pressure on our biotic resources, can function as parallel economies to the cash economy, including subsistence and gift economies. Another promising way to do this is by developing community-based software platforms. Over time, such communication platforms can extend to new types of social exchange, for instance digital currencies, outside of national currencies and conventional markets. Such processes would strengthen resilient rural and urban communities and enable them to take the reproduction of their livelihoods into their own hands.

E. The whole economic system in modern societies deeply depends on the state, which creates entire industries and provides regulative structures. The demand for goods and services by the state is another example. In fact, public procurement and infrastructure development constitute the lion's share of our economies. Therefore a shift towards commons-based public procurement is urgently needed. That includes, e.g., tax privileges for freely generated knowledge, information and infrastructures or bidding processes based on stipulated criteria that strengthen the participation of affected communities.

F. There is a need to clearly identify and communicate the "success criteria†of the commons and/or a loose taxonomy of successful commons. But developing indicators for creative and productive commoning is notoriously difficult. It is therefore essential to contribute to the development of inclusive metrics that recognize key criteria for broader wealth creation.

STREAM II: The Commons Challenges the Market/State Duopoly

A. The commons is the third element, beyond market and state, which needs structural and intellectual support.

B. The commons offers a rich set of governance models, and its constituting nature strives for a new style of social appropriation and participation. Despite its diversity and its dependency on certain laws or state support, the commons tend to be stable and to facilitate social autonomy and effective resource management. Nontheless, a successful commons is always the product of a continuous effort and struggle.

C. "The commons beyond market and state" does not necessarily mean without market and state, if we consider their rich history, enormous diversity and geographic dispersion. But it necessarily means that the people and their commons, supported by a partner state, become the core of wealth creation. It aims to create a vibrant ethical economy of new market forms that do not ignore natural and social externalities, but include them in their functioning logic.

D. Commoners transcend nation-state based citizenship and national civil societies. And their identity goes beyond that of passive consumer to responsible co-producer. Commoners are rooted in an enormous variety of mutually dependent communities. One of the core beliefs of the commons is the idea that the protection and creation of common wealth are not just beneficial to the commoners themselves, but to the local and global societies to which they also belong. A core belief in the commons is: I need others and others need me.

E: What we need is not just regulation by the state but greater responsibility of and accountability to affected communities regarding the criteria of human well-being. This is key. Instead of downsizing the state by strengthening the logic of the market, a commons-based policy campaigns for downsizing the scale and scope of the market by strengthening 'commons institutions'. That means establishing institutions designed for acting as trustees for the commons and enablers of the commons. New social technologies and distributed networks - which must be based on sustainable energy use- can spur this process.

F. Global commons entail a new kind of multilateralism which empowers local people as global citizens and enables nation-states to collaborate more effectively to overcome global collective-action problems.

STREAM III: The Generative Logic of the Commons

A. For building commons we have to build resilient communities, which in turn need cooperative and deliberative forms of communication and decision making. The communities also serve as learning arenas for the unfolding of skills and the underlying attitudes and mindsets for commoning.

B. The commons as a self-organized form of peer-to-peer production follows its own logic. Peer-to-peer production assumes equipotency of its participants, is based on free cooperation, aims to the creation of common goods and seeks to serve the greatest good for everyone. We believe this mode of production can be at least as productive as models that ignore the commons. And in terms of addressing social wealth and the reproduction of diversity, commons-based production models can even be more successful than those based on command, control and/or selling.

C. Productivity cannot be simply an artificial measure of an enterprise's performance; it must take into account all costs, including hidden subsidies, damages to the environment and other sorts of non quantifiable, non-market value that the commons routinely provides.

D. The commons is about taking one's life into one's own hands. Knowledge is key to do so, but knowledge is more than access to knowledge; and access to knowledge is something more than building technical infrastructure. Rapid diffusion of knowledge and innovation to all who need it requires:

• the sharing of information, code, skills and design through universally accessible or community based platforms
• the skills for understanding and reflection and
• their appropriation for shaping our social habitats.

Conceiving knowledge as a commons guarantees a fair share of innovation, without the friction and suppression of sharing caused through excessive intellectual property regulations.

E. Institutional structures can articulate and make possible new commons, but they can also undermine the social connections and ethics that are indispensable to the commons. Therefore, a key challenge in devising effective commons-based policies is to balance these two concerns properly. The bureaucratization of the commons is not a commons, but a paradox to which we must be attentive.

For the success of a commons oriented politics, an alliance and an earnest exchange of experiences and know how between all those who work on the social, ecological, cultural and digital commons, is imperative.

Discussion

J. Martin Pedersen: Some thoughts on language use in "Some Thought on the Commons"

A definite article vs. a plurality of ideas:

J. Martin Pedersen:

"For the purposes of developing the concept of commons as a policy platform - and keeping in mind the notions expressed in internal, post-conference discussion via email about "being wary of fundamentalist common-ism" (which is a "hypothetical" reference to the potentiality of "totalitarian tendencies ... inherent in all of us, once we start to think that our solution is the only good one, and needs to be imposed ..") - and with respect to the phrasing of these "Thoughts on the Commons" - I want to suggest that language is a form of magic that conjures up ideas in ways where even the smallest of differences can result in the sending of very different signals.

In this case - of this document - I do not think that the use of a definite article, such as in "...the commons...", is the best way forward, since a potential totalitarian seed can already be found in the use of a definite article. Compare: "thoughts on the idea" with "thoughts on ideas". (Some of the last surviving anarchists of the Spanish Revolution used to refer to "anarchism" --which they experienced as a viable form of social organisation throughout large parts of Spanish society when workers took control of the economy in the greatest commoning project of all times--, as "the idea" - that signals that their long struggle, successfull at first, and then defeated by the combined forces of Soviet state-capitalists and facists/nazis left them with "nothing" but the memories of "the idea"). Let us not start there! Let us prefigure a different trajectory for the concept of commons.

Instead I would suggest to call this document "Some Thoughts on Commons", because there are so many different kinds of commons. There is no "the commons". There is "the concept of commons" for what concerns policy making purposes, but it refers to a wide set of practical ideas and approaches to collective management and ownership of resources etc. You can find a commons that is thoroughly hierarchical and partriarchal and you can find other commons that are egalitarian - and everything in between.

For example where it reads: "The commons offers a rich set of governance models..."

I would suggest: "Commons offer a rich set of governance models"

That means that the key thesis would read like this instead (with additional cosmetic/flow oriented edits and a socially grounded conception of "environment"):

"Commons enable many social goals and goods, including environmental justice and food sovereignty".

In this way, by leaving out the definite article and pluralising commons (by leaving out the third person, singular "s" in "offers"), the text signals to the reader that the concept of commons is not a singular idea, but that the term "commons" refer to a plurality of options. Of course sometimes one wants to refer to a specific/particular commons, but there is no (grammatical) problem in using commons sometimes as plural, sometimes as singular - what is important is the way in which these choices send certain signals to the imagination of the reader, which in turn have philosophical and political implications.

Some might think that this is pedantic and hair-splitting nonsense, but keep in mind that a system of thought is likely to have sensitive dependence on initial conditions, so let us not start where the anarchist commoners ended upon subjection to the full force of opposition to freedom and self-determination, but pick up where they began and where they peaked, namely by creating diverse and federated commons where workers and local communities seize control of resources, infrastructure and the economy as such, and let us address these phenomena in the plurality that they deserve, and at the same avoiding any totalitarian tendencies, even if they are only potential and seem far fetched at this stage. After all, life is what we make it and the future is now."

More Information

Source: http://p2pfoundation.net/Some_Thoughts_on_the_Commons

David Bollier, noted commons expert and author of Viral Spiral, gives one of the opening keynotes.

Where do conservative urbanists, liberal activists, and free culture advocates congregate? Last week it was in Berlin at the first ever International Commons Conference (ICC) held by the Commons Strategies Group and the Heinrich Boll Foundation. The combination of traditional and digital commons was explored as a transformational paradigm for the first time through an international conference in keynote addresses, conference tracks, breakout groups, and plenary sessions over two days.

Sometimes conferences are cultural interventions. This seemed the case with the ICC. The conference was timely in a couple of important ways. The economic and environmental crises have leaders looking beyond government and the market for solutions. And the commons have come to the fore because of Elinor Ostrom's Nobel win last year for her work on the commons and the recent ascent of digital commons. Together, traditional and digital commons offer a way forward that combines local traditions of stewardship with connection to global civil society. 

Barbara Unmüßig, president of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, welcomed attendees highlighting the importance of the commons, as they, "could provide a catalyst for transition to a post-fossil era in which people actively help shape their lives and the environment they live in.† Indeed, a key thesis of the conference was that, "commons are the enabler for all other social goals, including environmental ones, which in essence are social."

In the keynote speech that followed, David Bollier suggested that attendees may look back on the conference as an historic moment when a diverse group of commoners began to reinvent the idea of the commons in a globalized context and connect isolated projects into a powerful movement. The richness of the dialog that followed certainly gave me the feeling that this was possible. 

The private, small group and plenary discussions were the most interesting to me for this reason. It was in these discussions that the different perspectives on the commons became most apparent, thus giving hints about how they might be combined into a more comprehensive worldview. Here are a few of the dividing lines I noticed during the conference:

• It seems that whenever people gather to discuss the commons, some time has to be spent defining them. The ICC was no exception. Part of one breakfast with Jay Walljasper and the On The Commons delegation was spent exploring the value of seeing the commons on a spectrum with pure commons at one end and private property at the other. Later, during an open space session on governing digital commons, it was pointed out to me that a set definition is important when government funding is tied to one. At another session with folks from Spanish speaking countries, I learned that there's really no word in Spanish for commons.

• There was much talk about the proper relationship between the market, the state, and the commons. On the one hand were the purists, who believe that commons should have no connection to the market. More moderate voices tended to think that markets are ancient human phenomenon just as commons are, and that they must somehow work together. During one of the open space sessions I attended, the group outlined a framework that could support commons. The idea was that commons need strong institutional support like markets have to be truly durable. In his keynote, Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation and the Commons Strategies Group summed up the proper relationship between the commons and the state saying that the state should support social production as a partner. 

• Another important axis was activist versus commons builders. Activists contended that the market poses a constant threat to commons and must be defended against vigorously. Free culture advocates and Transitioners had a different perspective – they feel that a good offense is the best defense. In other words, it may be easier to build anew what's wanted than change what exists. Then some others said that both approaches are needed.  Related to this axis was the understanding of commons as lifeboats in a crisis versus an inspiring upgrade from the status quo.

• While Michel Bauwens expressed hope about combining the traditional and digital commons, I was surprised that the cultural gap between digital and traditional commoners seemed fairly wide. And that gap didn't necessarily have to do with the critical fact that digital commoners interact with a non-rival resource and traditional commoners interact with a rival resource. For instance, on a train ride to visit a home healthcare coop in Berlin, Martin Pedersen explained that indigenous medicinal knowledge is place-based but that digital commoners see knowledge as abstracted from place. Another difference was the digital commoners see traditional commons as occurring naturally in contrast to digital commons which are constructed. This is despite the fact that all commons are social and ecological systems, even digital commons as they require natural resources to stay always on. 

All in all, it was an eye-opening event which fulfilled its promise. It opened a new vista where participants could see how diverse commons projects might work together thus laying a foundation for action.

RESOURCES:

• Conference wiki with agenda, notes from the open space, plenary notes, and participants
• The Commons - Prosperity by Sharing, an excellent overview of what commons are, why they matter, and a vision of a commons-based future.
• Videos of all the keynotes

Ruth Meizen-Dick, Silke Helfrich, and Michel Bauwens on a panel about commons as a transformational paradigm.

Source:  http://shareable.net/blog/notes-from-the-international-commons-conference

Here is a first rough documentation of final PLENARY discussion on conflicts, future orientation and outlook on going forward - use the discussion page to comment!

CONFLICTS

Contradiction between urgency of future of humanity and commons as lifeboats vs perceived optimism, which may be reflective of tension between traditional and knowledge commons; this tension was not enough reflected on
Tension between very different perspectives rooted in different experiences (grassroots vs more elite experiences)
Too weak analysis of current situation and change factors, for example, ecological vs marxist interpretations and for example how this affects understanding of open money / credit commons; or use of terms like Mother Earth
Differences between regions, Latin America and Europe is very different, for example regarding the state (more generally north south differences);
View of hybridity vs expectation of pure solutions, first is more optimistic than second
Commons as resources and community, and in between there is the process of commoning; but we never talk about the commoning as work;
Are commons nice to have as complement to market economy, or are they something that is necessarily a replacement of the market (on the long run)
Local vs global; tension between re- localisers and others focusing on globalization or reforming global polity
Stress the distinction between corporate platforms such as google, and real common resources like wikipedia; need for alliance between benign digital commons with empowering governance to identify common concepts to communicate to the outside
Political identity groups use too much the other to define themselves
A lot of voices are not represented, such as gender issues, and endangered local communities
Context of commons have not been sufficiently addressed such as environmental urgencies
We need a strategy of the commons as a policy platform but there was insufficient time to address it
Differences between planning approaches and emergency approaches; second one was underrepresented
There was a ignorance of the new methodologies that online facilitation can offer
Too many metaphores of defense against attack ...
Danger of hijacking the commons terminology need to be addressed more consistently

FUTURE ORIENTATION

We need to focus on commonality
We need to use new types of facilitation to unlock collective intelligence
We need to address livelihoods for people who are attempting to move away from corporate life forms; attention is needed to new forms that wean us from dependencies
We need to work on lack of knowledge, including on basic criteria to distinguish real commons from unreal ones
Can we be more of a commons in the next conference, more interaction at every level
We can use the United Nations to talk to the world
We have forgotten the history and genealogy of the commons and that there are legal precedents we can use
Challenge to bridge work across caucuses and sub-commons (ECOSOC may be an example)
Need to work on the values that we share, especially political values, and so attract more and more people to the commons as part of their lives
Commons as co-liberation
Commons is and must be about growing power, but to do this we have to think about power differentials and especially about the "enemy"

IDEAS FOR GOING FORWARD

Having a platform that allows us to document our dialogue and go forward on our proposals, following the experience in Brazil
11 bricks, political action, media, values and meaning, money and finance, technology, education, rules and regulations, social charter, organisation and administration, outreach and inclusiveness; create networks around these domains
Each commons is unique, blueprints do not work, it has to emerge
Meet again in Dakkar in February to talk and meet with global commoners, both world forum on science and democracy; and the world social forum; this requires a group of orgs; write to Dakkar at bienscommuns.org
Crosscultural dictionary of humankind based on our rootedness in nature
Create group of commons media people
Commons need policy expression; develop a deontology towards working with political representatives
India has created a commons alliance which could be replicated, it is offering to act as a template for other hubs, and is also thinking about the creation of a school of commons. There is a conference in February "Sustaining the commons"
Observatory of commons initiatives
Create global online TV to enable video sharing around commons
Action research on defending-transforming public services using new concept and languages that recognizes their importance for the commons; and think of the commons as a way to revive the public
Develop mechanisms to strengthen structures to defend, maintain and expand the natural commons, such as water
A declaration of the rights of nature to institutionalize the commons
Work against the tax havens to achieve transparency in the financial world
Mapping agents, resources, academics, in order to find each other more easily; regional clusters;
A bigger conference with funding for attendees from global south
Need for loose coordination structure
Considering water as a commons would eliminate conflict
Ecuador minister promises to bring commons topic to ALBA countries; also pledges to incorporate topics in her own ministry
Develop commons color and symbols to recognize each other in the movement
Media pool is created and documentary planned
IASC invitation to cooperate

Source: http://p2pfoundation.net/Berlin_Commons_Conference/Final_Plenary

The International Commons Conference  in Berlin on November 1-2 was an historic milestone in the emergence of the global commons movement.  Bringing together 180 or so commons activists, educators, and policy makers was a heroic effort by the conference organizers, particularly Silke Helfrich, David Bollier, and Michel Bauwens.

One of the interesting challenges that surfaced was the difference in perspective of those working with the tangible commons, such as natural resources, and those working with the intangible commons such as open-source software or free culture.  In many respects this is understandable since there are indeed differences in value-creation and sustainability algorithms between the two as noted in the simple chart below.  This is intuitively obvious.  For example, the more a forest is used, the more stress is generated on that particular ecosystem.  If not carefully managed, the value of the resource can decline.  In the digital world the more an open-source resource is used, such as Linux or Drupal, the more value it has.  This intangible value creation is congruent with Metcalfe's Law.

After the conference David Bollier and I commented that what didn't quite surface in Berlin was a meta-framework or meta-narrative that transcends the differences and included all commons:tangible and intangible.

In my view, such a meta-framework must take three critical dimensions into account: (1) value, (2) context, and (3) basis.

• Value. Particularly since World War II, human affairs have been dominated by an ethos that equates value and price.  And price, in turn, is mediated or determined through market mechanisms.  In recent times this tendency has been injected with steroids.  It's "natural” for the average MBA student to feel that anything can (and probably should) be monetized.  Such thinking, taken far enough, becomes grotesque.  For example, the Optimum Population Trust is advocating the creation of a market that allows for buying carbon offsets through reducing births in high-birth-rate countries.  Researcher Sian Sullivan notes, "Through 'PopOffsets' (www.popoffsets.com), then, the life of an 'unwanted' African baby, becomes 'valued' according to its equivalence to the reductions in estimated carbon emissions represented by its prevented birth, and its ensuing absent-presence as a carbon 'non-person'."

The commons offers a value formulation framework that is much more elastic than the market as the chart below notes.  It may indeed make sense to monetize a forest so that a commons forest trust can regulate logging rents.  But the commons also allows for the declaration of intrinsic value that does not need to be justified to the market.  What is the price of walking through a hardwood forest in autumn?  What is the price of standing beneath a giant Sequoia and looking skyward?  The commons orientation also allows us to extend our time orientation as we consider requirements for future generations.

• Context.  A well-known industrialist once quipped, "We live in an age of undue pragmatism.”  This "undue pragmatism” affects many dimensions of human affairs:political, social, economic, and cultural.  All and all, one can say that we live in fractured societies that impose a glass ceiling on the possibilities of human existence.  Understanding how we got to this point requires thoughtful reflection.  It is useful to delineate the systems and the interdependencies that contribute to our current state of affairs. The largest, most pervasive systems are often the most invisible:a monetary system whose very growth demands ever-increasing levels of debt, a civil law system that enshrines private property to the exclusion of other options, a view of human security that requires ever-escalating militarization, and so on.  Such systems reinforce perceptions of scarcity that lead to competition, fear, and aggression.

The commons start with different premises:that abundance can be generated through cooperation, that life is not a zero-sum game, and that ordinary people possess the intelligence and foresight to self-organize and manage their affairs.  And, by the way, such principles apply to both the tangible and intangible commons. 

• Basis.  Without exception, all human and institutional structures are based on presumptions about reality.  This tends to be uninspected but is critically important.  The Copernican Revolution was not only a shift from a geocentric to heliocentric view of the solar system.  It affected the basis of governance structures in Europe including the Church and the monarchy.  In the present day the insights of quantum mechanics are slowly seeping into the Western worldview and accord with what mystics, East and West, have said for centuries:the universe is an inherent unity.  This unity is not the result of some evolutionary process of increasing interconnectedness, but it is, rather, a priori or prior to any sense of apparent difference.   As the great physicist Erwin Schrodinger noted, "multiplicity is only apparent.  In truth, there is only one mind."

Why are these ontological foundations important for the commons?  As commoners attempt to engage existing institutions in the public and private sectors to protect and support various commons, they need not come hat-in-hand like some downtrodden NGO.  No, the commons can make claims of sovereignty that are antecedent to the establishment of either the public or private sectors.  This is not merely antecedent in terms of time, but is, rather, congruent with our deepening understanding of reality. 

My sense is that the next two years will be remarkably fertile as commoners worldwide begin to find our collective voice.  It's as if its faint murmurings are almost audible.  Please tell me, what do you hear?

The International Commons Conference

Berlin, Germany, November 1-2, 2010

Sponsored by the Heinrich Boll Foundation

in cooperation with the Commons Strategy Group

An Interpretive Summary by David Bollier

Table of Contents

• An Overview of the Conference
• Introductory Session. The Commons as a Transformational Paradigm
• Stream I. The Commons as a Challenge to Classical Economic Thought and a New Narrative for the 21st Century
• Stream II. The Commons As a Challenges to the Market / State Duopoly
  • Stream II Workshops
• Stream III The Generative Logic of the Commons
  • Stream III Workshops
• Speed Project Presentations
• Public Event, The Commons as the Template of Our Future
• How to Move Forward?
• Appendix A: Some Thoughts on the Commons
  • STREAM I: The Commons as a Challenge for Classical Economics
  • STREAM II: The Commons Challenges the Market/State Duopoly
  • STREAM III: The Generative Logic of the Commons
• Appendix B: Innovation Workshops
  • Stream III Innovation Workshops
  • Other Innovation Workshops

For years the commons has been gaining momentum as a new paradigm of economics, politics and culture. Its rise can be seen in countless milieus around the world: among indigenous peoples in Latin America determined to protect their ecosystems and cultures; among farmers in India defending the right to share seeds; among Croatians seeking to prevent the privatization of cherished public spaces; among communities trying to preventing multinational bottling companies from appropriating local groundwater; and among diverse digital commoners who are creating “shareable” resources such as free software, Wikipedia, open educational resources and open access journals.

Until recently, mainstream political culture has regarded the commons as an inevitable “tragedy” that results in the over-exploitation of scarce resources. This has helped make the commons a marginal side-story that could be safely ignored. But after the “economic crisis” of October 2008, it has been much harder to dismiss the commons as a tragedy, anachronism or novelty. It became even harder after the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Professor Elinor Ostrom, a pioneering scholar of the commons, in 2009. The growth of countless Internet commons has also been a pointed rebuttal to orthodox economists who regard the market as the only serious means for generating valuable resources.

For these and other reasons, the commons is increasingly being seen as a rich seedbed of community empowerment and a template for new types of fair and sustainable resource management. It offers a way to critique the failures of neoliberal capitalism while encouraging the development of innovative policy alternatives.

It was in this context that the Heinrich Böll Foundation – a publicly financed nonprofit organization affiliated with the German Greens that works independently with various partners through its 28 worldwide offices – decided to convene a major international conference on the commons. Working with the Commons Strategy Group, a small partnership of commons thinkers and activists, the Böll Foundation brought more than 180 international, Germany- and European-based commoners, intellectuals, activists and policymakers to Berlin, Germany, for the November 1-2, 2010, conference, preceded by project visits on October 31.

The stated goal of the event was “Constructing a Commons-Based Policy Platform.” To that end, the conference sought to assess the range of existing and potential commons-based policy approaches; develop the fundamentals of a policy framework that supports the commons; and identify and explore specific strategic opportunities to advance commons-based approaches.

The event also sought to foster new types of participation and self-organization among commoners worldwide; to promote new forms of networking that could spur new collaboration and cooperation; and to inaugurate new types of open, non-linear ways to search for solutions. The goal was to incubate new ideas and strategies and identify new communication strategies, prototype commons, funding models and research needs. Finally, the event aimed to enhance the visibility of the commons in the media, the blogosphere and other online venues.

“The simple yet powerful and complex question to be explored throughout the conference,” the Böll Foundation stated in its announcement of the conference, is: “What does a commons-based policy framework look like? What already exists and what do we still need to develop to nurture and protect diverse sorts of commons?”

This report, by David Bollier of the Commons Strategy Group,¹ is an attempt to describe the highlights of the conference and the more significant themes, philosophical tensions and strategic opportunities that emerged. This document is not a comprehensive account of the conference; there were too many different perspectives presented to capture that richness. This report is, rather, a selective, interpretive synthesis.

For a more complete sense of the conference, please consult the videos of presentations and other primary documents at the Boll Foundation website² and a variety of other papers, reports and blog posts at the official conference wiki.³

An Overview of the Conference

Barbara Unmüßig, President of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, opened the conference by noting how a woodland in the city of Templin, Germany, near the Polish border, had been entrusted to a trust following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The legal successor to that trust is now seeking to sell the wood to private parties – even though citizen and town authorities want to reclaim the wood as a common, ensuring that it will be accessible to everyone. But privilege is given to the private investor.

“Such controversies can be found all over the world,” said Unmüßig. “The question is always, ‘Who does it belong to? Who has the right of access to Griebnitzsee Lake, for example? Who do the water resources in a federal state belong to? Who do derelict inner-city sites belong to? Or the Internet? The Land? The drinking water or the waterworks? To whom does biodiversity belong?”

Unmüßig noted that the Boll Foundation has been exploring the issue of the commons for years, with such initiatives as a 2006 conference in Mexico City, a 2008 book anthology, To Whom Does the World Belong? and a series of political salons in Germany. She called on conference participants to explore “a new framework for the triangular relationship between ‘our’ commons, the market and the state.” She also urged new policies to support “the idea of the commons instead of regarding gross domestic product as the benchmark for everything in a market economy!”

In his welcome on behalf of the Commons Strategy Group, David Bollier noted, “Much of what brings us together is our shared resistance to a destructive system of market fundamentalism that insists upon the supremacy of private property and the price system over basic sustainability, equality, fairness and humane values.” But he noted that the commons movement “does not claim a unified-field theory of political change.” Rather, it is committed to an agenda that is “more modest, experimental and results-oriented. We are not looking for Big Daddy leaders to save us. We are stepping up to solve problems ourselves, without waiting for government or blue-ribbon commissions or corporate resources.”

In a sense, the conference actually began on October 31, when participants were invited to take tours of commons-based projects in Berlin. One project was a women’s housing and work project, Genossinnenschaft Schokofabrik eG. Another was a community-based nursing project, AKB. A third, NKL Karlshof, was a noncommercial agricultural project. Conference participants also got to know each other through a website containing short profiles of everyone, along with various commons-related documents.

In an attempt to synthesize some key points about the commons for discussion and reflection, the conference steering committee issued a two-page document, “Some Thoughts on the Commons,” which is included below in Appendix A.⁴ Also released at the conference was a major report written by Silke Helfrich, Rainer Kuhlen, Wolfgang Sachs and Christian Siefkes, “The Commons – Prosperty by Sharing.”⁵

The conference itself began with a session, An Overview of the Commons as a Transformation Paradigm. This was followed over the next two days with three thematic streams:

Stream I: The Commons as a Challenge for Classical Economic Patterns and Thinking, and a New Narrative for the 21^st Century;

Stream II: The Commons as a Challenge to the Market/State Duopoloy; and

Stream III: The Generative Logic of the Commons.

For each stream, there were several “consolidation workshops” that explored that stream’s themes in greater depth. To let participants explore topics of their own choosing, anyone could propose a self-organized “innovation workshop.” (A complete listing of these can be found in Appendix B. Documentation about some of them can be found on the conference wiki at http://p2pfoundation.net/ Berlin_Commons_Conference.) So, in addition to seven keynote presentations (in the introductory plenary session and three Streams), the conference featured “kickoff” speakers in more than twenty workshops.

The conference featured a number of other interactive formats as well:

“Speed presentations” of exciting commons projects, in which eight speakers had five minutes apiece to describe their initiatives;

World Café, in which self-organized discussion groups discussed basic principles of a “generative commons paradigm”;

A public event, in which two keynote speakers and two respondents considered the question of “the commons as the template for our future”; and

A closing plenary session, in which participants reflected on what worked and what didn’t work at the conference, and what strategies should be pursued in the future.

Introductory Session. The Commons as a Transformational Paradigm

In the introductory plenary session, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, President of the International Association for the Study of Commons (IASC) outlined the scope and importance of the commons in contemporary societies around the world.

“Once you start looking at commons, you see them everywhere,” said Meinzen-Dick. “That is part of what we have come together to celebrate and discuss in this gathering. The commons play a vital role in the livelihoods of billions of people. Over 1.6 billion people live in and actively use the 30% of the global land mass that is forest, and close to one billion people use the 40% land mass that is drylands.” A 1996 study found that community forests contribute up to 29% of people’s income in India, or $5 billion a year, which was twice the development assistance to India that year.

“These areas, although often classified by national law as public lands,” said Meinzen-Dick, “are in many places actively managed by their inhabitants, very often through common property arrangements. In addition to many forest and dry land areas, fisheries, pastures, irrigation systems, and the oceans are examples of commons. Even private lands may have an element of commons, such as when farmland is used for grazing in the dry season, or in the Mekong region where flooded rice fields are used for collective fishing, supplying poor people with important sources of protein and maintaining the biodiversity of fish species.”⁶

Meinzen-Dick noted with disappointment, “Garrett Hardin is still being taught in an uncritical fashion, as ‘truth’ rather than ‘myth’. Professor Elinor Ostrom has noted that at some universities in the U.S., the average student is assigned Hardin’s [“tragedy of the commons”] article three times.” Meinzen-Dick urged that we “move to correct university curricula, so that the ‘tragedy of the commons’ is replaced with a ‘strategy for the commons,’ and that we tap into the optimism of youth, combined with knowledge of the possibilities of collective action to trump cynicism and narrow self-interest, in a really transformational paradigm of the commons.”

In a second keynote introducing the commons as a transformational paradigm, Michel Bauwens, Founder and President of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives, gave a sweeping review of the evolution of cooperation throughout human history. Commons have existed from the pre-modern period, which featured slave, feudal and imperial orders, to the modern era of market-based, industrial order. But what distinguishes our time, Bauwens said, is the possibility of “globalizing the mutual coordination of small groups,” going well beyond “centralized hierarchy” to provide “autonomous, commons-based modes of provisioning.”

Achieving the potential of the commons in the peer-to-peer environment made possible by the Internet, however, requires some changes in the two dominant orders of power, the market and the state. Instead of a “welfare state” or “corporate welfare state,” governments need to become the “partner state,” facilitating the development of commons, said Bauwens. In addition, commoners need to “dis-embed markets from global capitalism” and make them more socially accountable. (verb missing in the following sentence) Two examples of the Arduino open-source computer hardware initiative, which makes sophisticated microelectronics cheaply available for customized purposes, and the initiatives by farmers to share seeds and so bypass the “artificially created scarcity” of genetically modified crops such as the “Terminator seeds.” (Under the Convention on Biological Diversity, there is a moratorium on Terminator Seeds and other “genetic use restriction technologies” (GURT), thanks to activities of civil organizations and farmers worldwide, some of them participating in the ICC, but the moratorium will certainly not last forever. )

“Bottom-up organizing” of new sorts of stable, networked communities is an important way to “embed value” outside of traditional markets, said Bauwens. But the commoners must also develop new sorts of “social charters” and legal mechanisms to protect their shared resources. They must also find better ways to connect with other players in the same ecosystem, and to escape monetary exchange and predatory market systems altogether, if possible. As an example, Bauwens pointed to the rise of “phyles,” or “sustainable, transnational value communities” that represent a new sort of self-provisioning model.⁷

The real challenge for the commons, said Bauwens, is how to secure the necessary support for its very different logic while still living within the existing market system. Another important challenge is how to create a global network of policymakers to advance the new value system.

Stream I . The Commons as a Challenge to Classical Economic Thought and a New Narrative for the 21^st Century

The commons offers a powerful critique to classical economic thinking and policy discourse that enshrines the market as the only serious system for meeting human needs. This critique is not just intellectual, but practical. There has always been a cornucopia of natural, cultural and social common pool resources. Self-organised commons are as ancient as community irrigation and as contemporary as the Internet. Stream I, organized by Silke Helfrich and Beatriz Busaniche, was based on a rejection of the economic orthodoxy that people cannot successfully manage shared resources over the long term for the benefit of all. Another premise of Stream I was that the commons is capable of helping us address the multiple crises of our time – economic, environmental, social, civic – while confronting the larger “growth-ist” paradigm.

There are many questions and uncertainties about actualising the commons as a new narrative, however. The relationship of the commons to the market and the state needs to be thought through. And if the commons is going to supplant the market in certain respects, people must be open to developing new means for reproducing their livelihoods. Appropriate policy support and physical infrastructure may be needed. Unlike the market order, which is build upon a strict separation between (economic) production and (social) reproduction, and between individual and collective interests and social and ecological concerns, the commons seeks to bridge these divisions and bring them into closer, more organic alignment.

This reintegration, however, will be impossible unless we first invent a coherent new narrative and policy framework. Two keynote speakers addressed these themes in a plenary session.

Alberto Acosta, Economist at Facultad Latinoameriana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) and the former President of the Constituent Assembly of Ecuador, explained his country’s innovative proposal to protect a rich zone of biodiversity within Ecuador. Speaking in Spanish, Acosta explained how the government of Ecuador plans to renounce the exploitation of a huge discovery of oil in a region renowned for its biodiversity, Yasuni National Park, in order to protect Yasuni ecosystems and the indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation there if there is international cooperation to do so, since the benefits of such an initiative are shared by the whole mankind (CO2 reduction). The government also wants to prevent future carbon emissions into the atmosphere that would result if the oil were extracted and burns. So it proposed an innovative trust, the Yasuni-ITT Initiative, under the auspices of the United Nations Development Programme. The Initiative promises to leave the oil in the ground if industrialized countries contribute at least half the market value of the oil into a special trust fund, which would be used to support renewable energy sources, reforestation, and social development within Ecuador.⁸

The plan represents a huge financial sacrifice for the Ecuadorian government because it depends upon oil for half of its tax revenues and 20% of its GDP. For the rest of the world, the plan represents just nine days without petrol. Yet despite its own sacrifices, the Ecuadorian government recognizes the long-term importance of protecting the remarkable natural biodiversity within its borders and reducing the release of additional carbon into the atmosphere.

Acosta called the Yasuni-ITT Initiative a new way to manage a global commons, the atmosphere, by re-aligning relationships among the industrialized nations and poorer nations. The richer countries of the global North “have a huge ecological debt to the world’s poorest countries,” Acosta said, citing the $90 billion in environmental damage that has been inflicted by British Petroleum, Chevron and Texaco. The Yasuni-ITT Initiative, he said, offered a practical scheme for exercising “co-responsibility in protecting the Amazon.” That is why the tagline for the proposal – which remains under-funded – is “An opportunity to rethink the world.” 

A second keynote about how the commons can challenge conventional economic thinking was delivered by Philippe Aigrain, co-founder and strategy adviser of the advocacy organization, La Quadrature du Net, and founder and CEO of Sopinspace, the Society for Public Information Spaces.

Aigrain described nine specific models by which the commons and markets may interact sustainably to their mutual benefit. He noted that historically commoners have been focused on how to prevent their resources from being turned into private property for sale on the market. However, in his talk, he sought to “go one step further” and consider “what type of relation we want to exist between the monetary economy and the commons. How can we organize their relations in order to guarantee the conditions of existence for extended commons? How can we ensure that individuals and independent groups have means to invest in the maintenance and the enrichment of the commons?”

Aigrain proceeded to review nine distinct models for combining the market economy with a commons. These models include:

1. Direct investment in a commons by economic players who had a stake in it;
2. The acquisition of basic skills and personal reputation through participation in a commons. These skills and reputation can then be marketed to obtain jobs or work for hire;
3. A requirement that successful market players spend or invest some portion of their extraordinary income on valuable social, environmental or knowledge-producing activities – i.e., commons and social public goods.
4. The use of alternative currencies within the commons that, up to a specified maximum, could be “converted” into “normal” consumption currency (i.e., the credits could not be invested in speculative ventures or held indefinitely).
5. Voluntary resource-pooling to fund commons-based projects, perhaps with the help of new intermediaries that can act as brokers between potential donors and project proponents.
6. Statutory resource-pooling, such as a government-mandated flat tax – but unlike most flat taxes, people could directly choose how the pooled money is spent.
7. Public trusts, a multi-stakeholder organization that is set up by governments or international organizations that fund them, which manages a designated commons (coastal land, natural reserves, the climate, etc.).
8. Tax-financed public subsidies that have some element of peer management, as, for instance, in science.
9. A basic income that enables people to freely decide how to allocate their time and talents to various commons, or earn more money in market activities.

Stream II. The Commons As a Challenges to the Market / State Duopoly

The history of industrial society is one of markets and the state dominating civil society, with periodic pendulum swings between periods of stronger regulatory states (the welfare state paradigm of social democracy and the New Deal, as well as the soviet and fascist state forms), and periods of “market-dominated” states (the corporate welfare state of neoliberalism). However, today, both the market and state are suffering from a strong and persistent systemic crisis, particularly since the meltdown of 2008. Meanwhile, civil-society networks are experiencing a resurgence, as seen in the growth of peer production models, the commons paradigm, and sharing practices and infrastructures.

Stream II, hosted by Michel Bauwens and Heike Löschmann, assessed the significance of these trends for various civil-society movements. It also looked at how the commons may shape the future of markets and the state, and local and global governance. James Bernard Quilligan, Chairman of the Secretariat, Global Commons Trust, made a keynote presentation about what he calls “Multilateralism 2.0,” a new international regime in which global citizens and social charters are forces in managing the emerging global commons.

In advance of the conference, Quilligan made the case for commoners becoming actively involved in imagining and advocating for new sorts of multilateral institutions. “Multilateralism gets a bad name because it’s associated with governments and their limited abilities to provide people- and ecologically-centered goods and services through international cooperation,” said Quilligan. “That’s certainly the case at the present. Let’s not forget that the multilateral institutions were initially created after WWII to provide global public goods. This experiment has been bungled for many reasons, mainly the one that you note, that neoliberal ideology has taken over.”

He continued: “That philosophy needs to be rooted out from the bottom-up, yes, but it cannot happen without sympathetic support from the top-down. Yet this is not simply a matter of tone, it’s a matter of actual laws and institutions. The commons will never scale up to the global level (or, to put it another way, become scale-free) simply through associations of like-minded commoners. It also needs institutional support from governments and the private sector, of course, to the extent that they will endorse this tripartite arrangement; but it also requires institutional support at the trans-boundary level of global common goods. The sky, the Arctic, the seabeds all need to have specific watchdogs and managers. Who is capable of organizing that? Not commoners, not public sector or private sector. They have no authority to do so and never will under the current circumstances.”

Quilligan added: “That’s why the commoners and multilateral institutions are (ultimately) natural allies -- which commoners have not yet realized. The break will come when government power evolves upwardly to empower new multilateral institutions in charge of managing specific global commons, and downwardly to the commoners who are vigilantly watching the commons across the world and who will work alongside the multilateral institutions for the protection of the commons -- now with actual authority for the global commons. The time will come when commoners will sit on the board of the (existing and new) multilateral institutions, along with government reps (let’s keep the private sector out of this). I don’t see anyone grappling with these matters,” said Quilligan, who urged that commoners begin to think about new sorts of multilateral institutions that could truly protect various commons, especially global ecological ones.

Stream II Workshops

Stream II was followed by a series of workshops that went deeper into the key themes of the stream. Workshop II/1, “Recovering the Autonomy and Primacy of Commoners,” explored the role that social charters, open licenses, access rights, the general demand for openness and transparency can play in securing the commons. More generally, the workshop sought to identify the set of (design) principles that allow for a commons-based making of rules, guidelines, laws and institutions. Denis Jaromil Rocio, a free software programmer and media artist who lives in Italy and The Netherlands, gave a kickoff presentation on these themes.

Workshop II/2, expanded upon the themes of the Quilligan keynote presentation by focusing on “The Commons and the State: Towards a Global Partner State.” The workshop stated: “Since it is unlikely that the State will wither away, and yet the commoners are inventing new modes of governance and autonomy for themselves, what should be the proper interrelationship of the commons and the state? What differential principles and design mechanisms might apply at different levels of governance, but specifically, at the global level?” These questions were addressed by Benjamin Coriat of Paris Nord University, France, and Ana Valadéz of Otros Mundos, Mexico.

Workshop II/3 focused on “The Commons as a Trust for Protecting the Earth: The Polycentric Governance Approach.” Frank van Laerhoven, Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, Netherlands, gave a kickoff presentation that started with the familiar quadrant that classifies goods by their “subtractability” and “rivalrous” nature (difficulty of excluding potential beneficiaries). The chart is often used to define resources as club goods, private goods, public goods or common pool resources.

This workshop focused in part on the value of “polycentrism” as a policy approach that could foster commons-based solutions.Polycentrism, a concept developed by Professor Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues, sees affirmative value in multiple levels of governance, each interacting with the other in a dynamic, fluid manner, rather than fixed, centralized and bureaucratic models of governance. In a polycentric model, power is diffused and participation is more feasible, which leads to a plurality of possible solutions to problems. It is unclear how the commons interacts with representative democracy, which ostensibly is the most legitimate way of addressing problems – but which, in practice, often results in unaccountable power and poor implementation. It was also unclear how customary law and practices can be honored in the face of markets and representative democracy.

Maude Barlow, a leading activist fighting water privatization and the National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, explained how governments are colluding with private companies in giving away their water commons. In Australia, for example, the government gave companies licenses to extract water at no cost, claiming it would enhance efficiency; in 2005 a new government began to buy back water rights in competition with hedge funds and banks. One encouraging counter-trend: The State of Vermont has claimed its groundwater as a common asset by invoking the “public trust doctrine” (although the legislation does not refer to the water as a commons).

In addition to the “consolidation workshops” proposed by the ICC Steering Committee in Stream II, there were two “self-organized workshops” initiated by participants. Workshop II/4, The Commons and Basic Income, was organized by Ulrich Steinvorth and Michael Opielka. Workshop II/5, organized by Massimo De Angelis, Jai Sen and Richard Pithouse, explored Commoning Through the Crisis: Creating Commons Power and Resisting Enclosures and Cooptation. The workshop explored the relations between commons, commoning and the crisis in the context of power (especially “power-to” rather than “power over”), and with reference to struggles to resist enclosure and cooptation.

De Angelis, Editor of The Commoner website and a professor at the University of East London, stressed that an analysis of power is crucial when discussing the commons, especially in talking about “power-to” relations rather than “power over.” Unless political and power relations are candidly discussed when talking about a commons and the social practices of commoning, De Angelis warned, the commons risks being neutralized and coopted. Jai Sen of the Commons Convergence in India pointed out the significant differences between types of commons, such as free software and seed-sharing commons, and the need to overcome the cultural differences that separate commons by building a common language and trust within and between movements.

Stream III The Generative Logic of the Commons

The value produced in the commons – its “generative logic” – is deeper than exchange-value for the market and comprehends much more. It is important to understand this fact in order to develop appropriate institutions and public policies that can support the commons. It is also important to strike a prudent balance between openness and control within the commons. Stream III, organized by David Bollier and Julio Lambing of e5 (European Business Council for Sustainable Energy), examined how the commons can produce abundance, both materially and socially, if there are appropriate relationships between the commons and markets.

Keynote speaker Roberto Verzola, an agricultural activist from the Philippines, talked about the “abundance of the commons.” He noted that “the fundamental assumption in economics is scarcity,” and yet a natural abundance can be seen in the human urge to communicate, in the urgent need of every living organism to reproduce, in the energy from the sun and in webs of positive human relationships. These different forms of abundance are what create commons, Verzola noted. To illustrate how abundance is something of a subjective condition, he told a joke: “Question: Before refrigerators, what did people do when they had too much food? Answer: They threw a party!”

“Under conditions of abundance,” Verzola continued, “reliability becomes more important than efficiency….Reliability means ensuring that the fruits of abundance are enjoyed without fail by all social sectors, our generation, as well as future generations. We optimize it by putting risk-reduction ahead of gain accumulation.”

Abundance can be dealt with in two different ways, said Verzola: People can “monopolize abundance for private profit-making” or they can “hold abundance in common for the good of the whole community and future generations.” Unfortunately, corporate privatization of the abundance of the commons is the norm, he said: “Corporations have destroyed the fertility of our soils, substituting commercial synthetics in their place; they have stopped the natural flow of mothers’ milk in favor of commercial formula; they have bought out independent seed companies, to force-feed us with genetically modified toxic foods, all in pursuit of profit. They have become, in Wolfgang Hoeschele’s words, ‘scarcity-generating institutions’.”

A key challenge facing commoners, Verzola said, is to cultivate the consciousness of abundance “by relying on each other and on commonly held sources of abundance that we ourselves can build and maintain.”

In a second keynote speaker, Stefan Meretz, a computer scientist, free software activist from Berlin and blogger with Keimform.de, offered his own perspective on the need to fortify the generative logic of the commons. He noted that his thinking has been deeply influenced by the example of free software, and of the functional viability of a software commons independent of the marketplace.

Meretz said that while markets create many products and services, “these things matter only if they can generate a profit. They are not focused on need-based value.” Moreover, capitalism has its own distinctive logic: it separates producers from each other, it separates producers from culture and it separates different needs from each other. In all these ways, markets serve to disembed the economy from society, and “forces us to meet our many different social and personal needs through a uni-dimensional medium, money.”

By contrast, the commons “produces things, knowledge and social relationships” but with a very different logic. In a commons, needs are negotiated prior to production, whereas in markets, needs are satisfying after production, through shopping. In a commons, conflicts are internally negotiated and resolved within the community; in markets, conflicts are externalized and displaced onto others. In a commons, values are multi-dimensional and pluralistic; in markets, values are expressed through money or numbers. In a commons, spending one’s time contributes to the quality of life; in markets, time-saving is an unavoidable coercion.

As this list suggests, said Meretz, the commons represents a logic of inclusion while the commodity logic favors exclusion. Commodity logic is incompatible with the commons, Meretz argued, because it tends to exploit and enclose the commons. Yet the market is the dominant social reality and must be dealt with. Therefore, he said, it is best to segregate the commons from markets as much as possible. But if the two are to interact, then great care must be taken in designing safe interfaces between them. Ultimately, he said, the goal ought to be to replace market functions with commons alternatives. As for the state, it may sometimes act as a trustee for the commons, and it should help assure our access to commons resources. But since state has its own logic and limited accountability, said Meretz, “It is best to use the state, but don’t trust the state. It is better to trust the commons.”

Audience reaction to the two presentations was quite spirited. Some argued that business as now constituted cannot truly be made compatible with the commons. Others argued, however, that a workable rapprochement between business and commons is entirely possible. “The desire to secure a purity of the commons doesn’t work,” said Philippe Aigrain of Sopinspace, France, citing the history of the commons in various contexts. He added that it is not self-evident which needs are best fulfilled by markets and which by commons. “Needs are very complex things,” he said. There was wide agreement that the terms of engagement between market and commons deserve much more discussion.

Stream III Workshops

Workshop III/1, “Understanding Value in a Commons Economy,” started with the premise that a commons is at once economic, social, cultural and moral. It is also rooted in a particular local context. To understand the proposition of the commons, then, it is important to ask: How does a commons generate what we need for our lives? How does commons-generated value differ from that generated by markets, and how does it vary from one commons to another? What means can protect commons-based wealth?

Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen of the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna, started by distinguishing exchange-value, the form of value that generally prevails today, from the value generated by a commons. She then argued that the co-existence of exchange value and common value is unsustainable because exchange value typically seeks to extract value from the local and shift it to global players. This has been the historic role of money and taxation in former colonies, for example. Exchange value tends to produce exploitation and exclusion, she said.

Adam Arvidsson of the University of Milano, Italy, agreed that we need a revolution in the value system, but – in his vision - this revolution is already taking place in the networked economy. The economic logic of capitalism has historically been based on “institutionalized social value” – i.e., market exchange value, Arvidsson said. This has been the “iron cage” that has permitted modern efficiency. But in today’s industrial capitalism, he said, this base of value no longer works in immaterial production (design or knowledge creation, for example), nor in the diffused and networked forms of material production. That is because value is no longer enclosed within the walls of private companies, but rather is socialized in the general intellect. Value is about maintaining coherence within complex networks, but this is harder for companies to do today, he said, because, in environments of heavily socialized and abundant resources, it is possible to create and re-create productive work relations without relying on hierarchies. In Arvidsson’s opinion, the emerging “ethical economy” is in this way causing a crisis of value of capitalism.

Workshop III/2 examined “Institutional Structures and the Commons: Advantages and Challenges.” Brian Davey of FEASTA, Great Britain, and Marc Mascarenhas-Swan of Jas-econ, a Bay Area economics cooperative in the United States, discussed some of the institutional, legal and policy structures that can help maintain a commons.

For decades, there have been two competing (or at least, unconnected) strategies. One group of commons activists has sought to build up their own complex administrative institutions in the hope of changing societal institutions. This strategy is embodied in such examples as cooperatives, land trusts and the General Public License for software. Meanwhile, others have focused on changing micro-practices and on building up networks of small grassroots institutions with modest-to-nonexistent infrastructures. In many cases, both parties accuse each other of acting in a futile and ineffective way, especially when it comes to the question which strategy is apt to establish a more commons-sensitive economy. This workshop evaluated the strategic effectiveness of different approaches and looked at the design principles of successful commons in general and for specific types of resources.

Finally, Workshop III/3, “Limits and Boundaries vs. Openness and DIY Approach,” explored the deep tensions between the open-to-all platforms and a bounded commons of distinct members and rules. For example, it is not self-evident how safety can be assured in open-design automobiles and or how practitioners of DIY [do it yourself] synthetic biology can be trusted to prevent irreversible biological harms. Some people question Wikileaks’ disclosures of “state secrets” as putting lives at risk. Others believe that indigenous people’s sacred knowledge and practices should be controlled by them, and not made openly available to everyone.

Pat Mooney, Executive Director of the ETC Group in Canada, noted that “one community’s openness is another’s enclosure.” Thus, for example, trade negotiations at a recent round of talks in Nagoya, Japan, did not raise the question of digital access to the DNA of indigenous peoples. This means that digital maps of germplasm can be compiled with no stipulated benefit to the people from whom it was taken. In another context – synthetic biology – open access to knowledge about DNA means that anyone can theoretically assemble her own strands of DNA using “BioBricks” and treat the basic elements of life like Lego blocks. This raises serious questions about how to control potentially harmful and irreversible genetic innovations. Mooney added that DIY biologist-hackers are not the most serious risk; the most serious dangers are likely to come from normal, commercial releases of synthetic biological organisms. One example is synthetic microbes being designed for biofuels in Brazil.

Glyn Moody, a tech journalist who blogs at “Open Source, Open Source, Open Genomics, Open Content,” noted that there is no way to stop or police the DIY experimentation of synthetic biology. The best approach is to assure openness in order to encourage a large community of practitioners to try to identify and control dangerous practices. Mooney agreed that cultivating social norms about the control of synthetic organisms is the best, long-term approach. Unfortunately, in the short term, citizens have little political power in securing new laws and international treaties to control open biological innovation. Furthermore, the pace of change is just too fast.

However, he said, it would be useful if the United Nations or another international body were to develop new international standards and procedures for evaluating new technologies. Mooney takes some comfort in the fact that 85% of the world’s food production remains outside of the control of Monsanto, DuPont and other ag-biotech corporations.

Speed Project Presentations

To give quick introductions to a variety of exciting commons projects and showcase the practical value of the commons approach, the conference heard eight “speed project presentations,” as moderated by Beatriz Busaniche.

1. Open Hardware: Arduino, Massimo Banzi, Italy.

Banzi described the Arduino open-source design community that develops cheap, easy-to-use computer components that can be shared and modified by anyone (weblink: http://www.arduino.cc). The enterprise has a business model that is based on the counter-intuitive notion of “giving away what we design.” While anyone can freely copy and modify the electronic components designed by Arduino, the enterprise has a trademark on its name. It makes money and controls its brand reputation by licensing its name to anyone wishing to sell Arduino-designed boards. Arduino’s designs have attracted considerable attention, and even companies like Microsoft use Arduino-designed products to prototype their new devices. Banzi also described a variety of innovative uses of Arduino kits, from wrist-devices for BlackBerries to clothing with electronic sensors to a homemade, open-source Segway scooter.

2. Commons – Spaces of the Poor: >Foundation for Ecological Security, Jagdeesh Rao, India.

Rao described a people’s movement for reforestation in India and the attempt by the Foundation for Ecological Security (weblink: http://www.fes.org.in) to claim “wastelands” used for subsistence by poor people, as commons. He noted that the National Wastelands Development Board in India has been eager to use the lands to support biofuels production, and local cooperatives are focused on earning profits and tend to disenfranchise commoners and harm the ecosystem. “This has produced serious inequality among some villages, driven in part by coops that are market-driven.” The FES seeks to persuade government to institute new policies that would protect the commons for subsistence use by commoners. Rao’s organization will co-host the 13^th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons in Hyderabad, India in January 2011 (weblink: http://iasc2011.fes.org.in).

3. Traditional Knowledge Commons: Natural Justice, Gino Cocchiaro, Australia/South Africa.

Cocchiaro spoke of the importance of traditional knowledge to the indigenous peoples. His organization, Natural Justice (weblink: http://www.naturaljustice.org), is committed to “facilitating full participation of indigenous people in modern communities and the implementation of law and policy that affect biodiversity and cultural heritage.” The focal point of Cocchiaro’s talk was a “traditional knowledge license,” which enables communities to license their knowledge for noncommercial uses, typically to academics and other researchers. The licenses stipulate the specific terms of usage, such as attribution of the community, returning any research back to the community, or requiring that any derivative knowledge be shared with others.

4. Reputation Based Exchange Commons: >Digital Trust Platform, John Clippinger, The Law Lab, Harvard University, USA

Distilling seven years of research, Clippinger explained how he and his colleagues at the Law Lab (weblink: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/lawlab) are attempting to develop new sorts of “trust frameworks” for “member networks” on the Internet. The goal is to assure people’s digital identities, privacy and security by helping them control information about themselves. The project also seeks to design new sorts of trusted “governance platforms” that enable new ways of governance and collaboration. The platform is based on open source software and transparent social norms, and offers the rare opportunity to re-invent certain societal institutions and develop new systems of community-negotiated, evolvable “law.” These innovations depend fundamentally on finding new software systems for protecting user-centric identity, assuring “honest signaling” that engenders social credibility and accountability, and prevents collusion and corruption of the system and those who govern.

5. Digital Cultural Commons: José Murilo, Ministry of Culture, Brazil

Murilo described how Brazilian leaders are helping transform digital culture policies from within the government. The effort started with Gilberto Gil, the world-renowned musician who became minister of culture in 2003. Gil grew out of the tropicale musical movement in the 1960s, which prized openness, cross-cultural communication and a new fusion of left/right politics – traits that inform the digital policies that Murilo has been working to implement. These include the development of a social network platform that allows for open and collaborative public policy design; reform of the Brazilian copyright act; a national broadband program; and empowerment of local communities by providing them with digital media, open source software and technical workshops. “This is an example of how culture and politics can push the commons into a new narrative,” said Murilo. (Weblink: http://p2pfoundation.net/Brazilian_Digital_Culture_Forum).

6. Urban Commons: Transition Town Movement, Gerd Wessling, Germany

Wessling described the rise of the Transition Town movement (weblink: http://transitionnetwork.org), a global, grassroots movement to re-localize economies in anticipation of the economic and environmental shocks of “Peak Oil” and climate change. The idea originated with Rob Hoskins in Totnes, Great Britain, who, as a permaculture teacher, is accustomed to “working with what you have and thinking holistically,” said Wessling. Transition Towns are initiating pragmatic, experimental innovations to try to make their localities more self-reliant and ecologically sustainable while retaining a sense of the global conditions of the planet and other localities. It turns out to be a fast growing and inspiring movement especially in Europe. Founded in 2006, there are now 341 official transition initiatives and several thousand mulling.

7. Credit Commons: Thomas Greco, USA

A major problem with our economy, said Greco, a long-time advocate for alternative money systems, is the private control of access to credit by banks and national governments. A growth imperative is built into the money system, and debt must increase simply with the passage of time. Greco’s work is focused on calling attention to the “credit commons”; educating people about historical and current exchange alternatives that can be optimized and scaled up to provide a sufficient supply of credit to productive enterprises; and trying to develop an honest and equitable network for facilitating cashless, interest-free trading over wide areas – an innovation that Greco calls “social money.” To succeed, credit-clearing networks will require governments to respect the rights of contract and association, and not interfere with the new credit systems. Greco is the author of The End of Money, among other books on reinventing credit; his websites include http://reinventingmoney.com and the blog http://beyondmoney.net.)

8. P2P Urbanism: Nikos Saligaros, Greece.

Salingaros spoke about his group’s explorations of peer-produced urban design, which is more human-scale and ecologically sensitive than traditional urban design of the past century. The latter, he said, “is not fit for human habitation” because it “imposes anti-human, anti-social geometric patterns on people.” P2P urbanism attempts to “extract geometries that enhance life, usually found in traditional settlements and towns that have been settled for thousands of years,” and then identify their rules and publish openly about them. Anyone can then use the rules and anyone can contribute to the body of knowledge. The designs are used as “DNA for urban spaces” around the world, but in each case they adapt to the local circumstances and so are responsive to local needs. (For more on Saligaros and P2P Urbanism: http://p2pfoundation.net/Nikos_Salingaros.)

Public Event, The Commons as the Template of Our Future

Because the ICC could not accommodate all the people who wished to attend, and because there is keen interest in Berlin about managing shared public resources, conference organizers planned a public event featuring two speakers about “the commons as the template of our future.” Both speakers see the commons as attractive alternative forms of governance, resource management and social equity and both predict that it will have larger political and economic implications at all levels of governance – local, regional, national and global.

The first speaker was María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés, Minister of National Patrimony (MNP) for Ecuador, who is coordinating ten ministries. Garcés delivered a bracing talk in support of the commons as a way to address economic inequality, social exclusion, market enclosures and the failures of neoliberal public policy. To talk about the commons, she said, invites us to ask new sorts of questions about participation in policymaking, property structures and “access modalities” that limit or open people’s access to resources.

The commons also raises questions about the proper “institutional frameworks” for managing resources, said Garcés. “Is the multilateral, regional system adequate?” she asked. “Perhaps no.” The geopolitical perspective does not take account of localization, biodiversity and carbon dioxide emissions on a global scale, she noted. “We need to reassess the role of the state and, for example, the very categories of public and private.”

A key question, Garcés continued, “is, How should the management of the commons be realized in a market economy?” One way to start is to “replace the idea of ‘development’ with ‘good living’ or ‘a rich life’ - the concept of buen vivir as discussed in many Latin American countries” – by which Garcés means “a live lived in abundance and in relationship with nature.” The primary goal of policy should not be to boost Gross Domestic Product, with per-capita income as the metric, but to develop new indicators for measuring happiness.

That said, “it is not a responsibility of the state to provide happiness,” she added. What is most needed is minga, or “mutual support” (minga is also a classical form of collective water management in Ecuador). Garcés concluded by noting that “The concept of the commons must become part and parcel of politics. Without it, politics will cater to corporations, encourage non-participation and revive colonialism.”

The second speaker at the public event was Silke Helfrich, a commons advocate, lead organizer of the conference and co-founder of the Commons Strategy Group. Helfrich started by describing a number of enclosures of until now public resources and their anti-social consequences in european urban spaces. When she was visiting Florence, Italy in July 2010, she noted with dismay, “There were no places to sit or get a drink of water unless you went to a café or some proprietary space. If you don’t want to just sit on the ground, as some young people do, you have to pay 2.8 euros for water just so no one seems to notice.”

Nanotechnology may provide interesting solutions to some of the problems we face, but it triggers also a new dynamic of enclosure of nature that is marching forward with alarming speed, said Helfrich. The European patent office expects that the market value of nanotechnology products will be 1 trillion euros by the year 2015. The problem with nanotechnology is its role in “privatizing matter.,” she said. “Using nanotech methods, matter as we know it is broken down to the nanoscale, then claimed as private property, which broadens the scope of the patents enormously for products stemming from nanotech research.”

Helfrich also noted the privatization of the Berlin main train station and the current battle between transit officials and citizens in Stuttgart over the planned destruction of a treasured train station in order to speed up train traffic.

It is important to realize that “the commons is not a discussion about objects,” said Helfrich, “but a discussion about who we are and how we act. What decisions are being made about our resources?” One of the great virtues of the commons, she added, is that it “draws from the best of all political ideologies.” Conservatives like the idea of responsibility in a commons; liberals are pleased with the focus on equality and basic social entitlement; libertarians like the emphasis on individual initiative; and leftists like the idea of limiting the scope of the market. Over the long term, said Helfrich, “the commons has the potential to fundamentally transform society.”

There were two brief responses to both presentations. Richard Pithouse of Rhodes University and a poor people’s movement activist in South Africa warned against easy binary oppositions when talking about the commons, such as pitting “capital” against “indigenous peoples.” “This encases indigenous people in a bubble as objects. They may in fact have their own aspirations to modernity, and cosmopolitan people for their part are often dispossessed from their own resources.” While the commons helps us begin to address the global crises that are upon us, Pithouse also warned that this framing of the big picture may eclipse the immediacy of the crisis at hand. It can privilege the human agency of more affluent, enfranchised people and marginalize the urgent needs of poor people.”

Barbara Unmüßig, President of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, urged “resistance and solidarity for those who want to protect the commons,” and stressed the need for new sorts of North/South solidarity. In industrialized nations, a key question is how to reform the welfare state, which is based on redistributing the prosperity of the market economy. How do we de-couple justice from economic growth? No one knows how to solve this.” However, to talk about the commons is to begin to address the “democratic deficits” that various market enclosures reveal. It is also a way to begin to think about social innovation and alternatives to growth and market exploitation.

How to Move Forward?

A final, plenary session solicited the viewpoints of all participants about how work on the commons should move forward in more specific, strategic ways.⁹ First, a number of unresolved issues were identified for further reflection and debate. These included:

• Tensions among commoners with very different perspectives based on different regional and social experiences (e.g., grassroots vs. more elite experiences; in attitudes toward the state; and between the global North and South generally);
• Tensions between traditional and natural resource commons on the one hand, and knowledge and digital commons on the other;
• Differences in whether hybrid solutions offer greater potential than “purer” solutions, and whether the commons is a complement to the market economy or a viable substitute for it over the long term;
• Tensions between those who focus on local commons and global commons;
• The absence of many voices at the conference for gender issues, and endangered local communities, for example;
• The urgent need for a commons-based policy platform but a lack of time to develop one in the face of emergency needs;

In terms of moving forward, there was much emphasis on the need to focus on commonality and to find new ways to mobilize collective intelligence. This is important in attracting more people to embrace the commons as part of their daily lives. Some people want to address the challenge of developing new livelihoods for people who wish to move away from corporate life forms and wean us from dependencies. Others believe that the commons must be about growing power, but to do this we have to think about power differentials and especially about “the enemy.” There were also reminders that the history and genealogy of the commons has much to teach us, including legal precedents that we can use.

A number of suggestions were made for advancing the commons in specific ways:

• Develop a policy platform that can be used by political representatives;
• Recognize that no single blueprint will work for all commons, because each commons is unique and plans must emerge organically;
• Use the World Social Forum in Dakar as an opportunity to organize and reach out to others;
• Organize a network of commons-oriented media people; create a global online video service to share video about the commons; and produce a documentary and attractive symbols for the commons;
• Create “commons alliances” in different regions, as India has done, and consider creating a “school of the commons”;
• Establish an “observatory of commons initiatives” to map and coordinate commons initiatives, resources and academics, and bring initiative to wider awareness;
• Find new ways to defend and transform public services using commons framing and language; and
• Host a larger international conference about the commons, with greater funding for people from the global South.

Because it is impossible to cover the many issues discussed in more than twenty self-organized workshops, the reader should consult the conference wiki (http://p2pfoundation.net/Berlin_ Commons_Conference) for further documentation about those sessions. More about the final plenary session can be found at http://p2pfoundation.net/Berlin_Commons_Conference/Final_Plenary.

The International Commons Conference ended with a great deal of enthusiasm for continuing the conversation, developing new collaborations, identifying promising strategic opportunities and reaching out to a wider range of commoners. The event raised far more questions and challenges that it could possibly resolve, yet it was nonetheless an inspiring, catalytic gathering. It introduced more than 180 global commoners to each other in a shared set of presentations and dialogues. It demonstrated the rich range of commons initiatives now underway worldwide and showed the strong interest in advancing commons-based research, activism, organizing and media work. It elicited new ideas and proposals for moving forward and helped identify available resources. Finally, it helped identify many key thinkers, activists and institutional players who want to work together to develop a shared agenda.

For all of these reasons, the conference was less of an ending (after months of planning and organizing) than a new beginning. A new vista of opportunities was revealed. As Michel Bauwens wrote on his blog, “The various constituent movements related to the commons met for the first time, entered in a serious dialogue and recognized the need for joint policy frameworks about the global commons. The wish to continue this conversation and constitute a intermeshed global movement was palpable.” His post was entitled, “The Emergence of a Global Commons Movement, Year Zero.”¹⁰

###

Appendix A: Some Thoughts on the Commons

Prepared by the Steering Committee, International Commons Conference, to stimulate discussion and reflection

(Michel Bauwens, David Bollier, Beatriz Busaniche, Silke Helfrich, Julio Lambing, Heike Löschmann)

Commons are the enabler for all other social goals, including environmental ones, which in essence are social.

STREAM I: The Commons as a Challenge for Classical Economics
 

A. The commons will not succeed in challenging contemporary economics and conventional institutional design unless it:

• challenges the core beliefs of underlying conventional economics and the behavioral correlations induced by prevailing institutional designs;
• reinterprets the meaning of property from private ownership to collective stewardship; and
• develops coherent concepts that are also empirically provable and convincing alternatives to the conventional numerical "bottom lines".

B. The inherent features of the commons are abundance and diversity.

• If we respect diversity and engineer for abundance, the commons continuously (re)-produce enough for all.
• Wherever we can – in case of nonrival resources and generosity – the product of the commons should be universally available; where we cannot – in case of rival resources – the product of the commons should be equitably distributed.

C. A viable society is based on cooperation and co-production rather than the classical division of labor that separates resource producers and providers from resource users, which treats nature, community and culture as exploitable externalities.

D. Markets are not the only source of wealth creation. The commons, which are responsive to popular, democratic voices and to the pressure on our biotic resources, can function as parallel economies to the cash economy, including subsistence and gift economies. Another promising way to do this is by developing community-based software platforms. Over time, such communication platforms can extend to new types of social exchange, for instance digital currencies, outside of national currencies and conventional markets. Such processes would strengthen resilient rural and urban communities and enable them to take the reproduction of their livelihoods into their own hands.

E. The whole economic system in modern societies deeply depends on the state, which creates entire industries and provides regulative structures. The demand for goods and services by the state is another example. In fact, public procurement and infrastructure development constitute the lion’s share of our economies. Therefore a shift towards commons-based public procurement is urgently needed. That includes, e.g., tax privileges for freely generated knowledge, information and infrastructures or bidding processes based on stipulated criteria that strengthen the participation of affected communities.

F. There is a need to clearly identify and communicate the "success criteria” of the commons and/or a loose taxonomy of successful commons. But developing indicators for creative and productive commoning is notoriously difficult. It is therefore essential to contribute to the development of inclusive metrics that recognize key criteria for broader wealth creation.

STREAM II: The Commons Challenges the Market/State Duopoly

A. The commons is the third element, beyond market and state, which needs structural and intellectual support.

B. The commons offers a rich set of governance models, and its constituting nature strives for a new style of social appropriation and participation. Despite its diversity and its dependency on certain laws or state support, the commons tend to be stable and to facilitate social autonomy and effective resource management. Nontheless, a successful commons is always the product of a continuous effort and struggle.

C. “The commons beyond market and state” does not necessarily mean without market and state, if we consider their rich history, enormous diversity and geographic dispersion. But it necessarily means that the people and their commons, supported by a partner state, become the core of wealth creation. It aims to create a vibrant ethical economy of new market forms that do not ignore natural and social externalities, but include them in their functioning logic.

D. Commoners transcend nation-state based citizenship and national civil societies. And their identity goes beyond that of passive consumer to responsible co-producer. Commoners are rooted in an enormous variety of mutually dependent communities. One of the core beliefs of the commons is the idea that the protection and creation of common wealth are not just beneficial to the commoners themselves, but to the local and global societies to which they also belong. A core belief in the commons is: I need others and others need me.

E: What we need is not just regulation by the state but greater responsibility of and accountability to affected communities regarding the criteria of human well-being. This is key. Instead of downsizing the state by strengthening the logic of the market, a commons-based policy campaigns for downsizing the scale and scope of the market by strengthening ‘commons institutions’. That means establishing institutions designed for acting as trustees for the commons and enablers of the commons. New social technologies and distributed networks – which must be based on sustainable energy use – can spur this process.

F. Global commons entail a new kind of multilateralism which empowers local people as global citizens and enables nation-states to collaborate more effectively to overcome global collective-action problems.

STREAM III: The Generative Logic of the Commons

A. For building commons we have to build resilient communities, which in turn need cooperative and deliberative forms of communication and decision making. The communities also serve as learning arenas for the unfolding of skills and the underlying attitudes and mindsets for commoning.

B. The commons as a self-organized form of peer-to-peer production follows its own logic. Peer-to-peer production assumes equipotency of its participants, is based on free cooperation, aims to the creation of common goods and seeks to serve the greatest good for everyone. We believe this mode of production can be at least as productive as models that ignore the commons. And in terms of addressing social wealth and the reproduction of diversity, commons-based production models can even be more successful than those based on command, control and/or selling.

C. Productivity cannot be simply an artificial measure of an enterprise’s performance; it must take into account all costs, including hidden subsidies, damages to the environment and other sorts of non quantifiable, non-market value that the commons routinely provides.

D. The commons is about taking one’s life into one’s own hands. Knowledge is key to do so, but knowledge is more than access to knowledge; and access to knowledge is something more than building technical infrastructure. Rapid diffusion of knowledge and innovation to all who need it requires:

• the sharing of information, code, skills and design through universally accessible or community based platforms
• the skills for understanding and reflection and
• their appropriation for shaping our social habitats.

Conceiving knowledge as a commons guarantees a fair share of innovation, without the friction and suppression of sharing caused through excessive intellectual property regulations.

E. Institutional structures can articulate and make possible new commons, but they can also undermine the social connections and ethics that are indispensable to the commons. Therefore, a key challenge in devising effective commons-based policies is to balance these two concerns properly. The bureaucratization of the commons is not a commons, but a paradox to which we must be attentive.

For the success of a commons oriented politics, an alliance and an earnest exchange of experiences and know how between all those who work on the social, ecological, cultural and digital commons, is imperative.

October 31, 2010

Comments are welcome at comments@commonsstrategies.org.

Appendix B: Innovation Workshops

The names listed are the organizers of each workshop.

Stream III Innovation Workshops

III/4 The Ways of Knowledge and the Means of Shaping the Habitat: Policy Implications of Different Models of Sharing Knowledge
Narahari Rao

III/5 Global Villages: Finding Common Ground Between Mountain Villages Around the World
Betsy Taylor, Maria Bareli, Effrosyni Koutsoutis, Franz Nahrada

III/6 Digital Commons: Mapping the Digital Commons, Development of a Common View and Analysis of Sustainability and Governance Models
Mayo Fuster and Philippe Aigrain

Other Innovation Workshops

Economics

i1 The Role of Money/Credit/Currencies in the Commons Context - Thomas Greco, Ludwig Schuster

i2 Creating Abundance Art Centers: Cultivate the arts, skills, knowledge and networks that nurture abundant life. -Wolfgang Hoeschele

Technology

i3 New Enclosures of the Commons: The transition to the Biomass Economy and Geo-engineering - Pat Mooney

i4 Creating Knowledge Commons Within Universities: Strategies for Re-orienting Higher Education - Silje Graupe

i5 Knowledge Networking and Education - Leo Burke, George Pór

i6 Open Access as a Knowledge Commons - Rainer Kuhlen

Politics, Law and Concepts

i7 Creating a Political Voice for the Commons - Ruth Meinzen-Dick

i8 Legal Aspects/Problems/Solutions Regarding the Commons - Carolina Botero, Claudio Ruiz

i9 Bringing the Discussion on the Commons to Dakar, the World Social Forum, in February 2011 - Frédéric Sultan, Suzanne Humberset, Hervé le Crosnier, Valérie Peugeot, Alain Ambrosi, Simon Roux

i10 Enabling a Mutually Beneficial Collaboration Among Diverse Commons Groups at All Levels, using the United Nations - Linsinka Ulatowska

i11 The Rights of Mother Earth versus the Commons? - Nicola Ballard (Focus on the Globa), Alberto Acosta (FLACSO, Maude Barlow (Council of Canadians)

i12 Common Heritage of Humanity - James Quilligan

i13 What Can the Commons Paradigm Contribute to the Transformation of the Welfare State? - Brigitte Kratzwald

1 The Commons Strategy Group is an internationally focused group consisting of Silke Helfrich (Europe), David

Bollier (North America), Michel Bauwens (Asia) and Beatriz Busaniche (Latin America).

2 http://www.boell.de/economysocial/economy/economy-commons-10451.html

3 http://p2pfoundation.net/Berlin_Commons_Conference. At the conference, most plenary conference proceedings were translated from English into Spanish or Spanish into English (except for Stream II). English/German – German/English translations were provided during the public evening event on November 1.

4 http://p2pfoundation.net/Some_Thoughts_on_the_Commons

5 http://www.boell.de/downloads/20101029_Commons_Prosperity_by_Sharing.pdf

6 The full text of Meinzen-Dick’s remarks can be read at http://p2pfoundation.net/Commons_as_a_Transformation_Paradigm.

7 For more, see David de Ugarte’s essay, “Phyles: Economic Democracy in the Network Century, at http://deugarte.com/gomi/phyles.pdf.

8 The Yasuni-ITT website is here: http://yasuni-itt.gob.ec/espanol/trust-fund-terms-of-reference. The official proposal can be read here: http://yasuni-itt.gob.ec/wp-content/uploads/initiative_change_history_se....

9 The full list of suggestions can be viewed here: http://p2pfoundation.net/Berlin_Commons_Conference/Final_Plenary

10 http://p2pfoundation.net/Emergence_of_a_Global_Commons_Movement,_Year_Zero

by Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation blog, November 14, 2010

With the Commons Strategies Group (David Bollier, Silke Helfrich, Bea Busaniche, and myself) and associates from the Heinrich Boll Foundation (Heike Loeschmann) and E5 (Julio Lambing), as well as a host of enthusiastic volunteers of a support committee, the first International Commons Conference was held in Berlin, November 1 and 2. It's subtitle was: 'Towards a Commons-based Policy Making Framework.'

Though we may not have met the goal of policy making itself, I believe we can say with confidence that the meeting was a success nevertheless. Yes, the International Association for the Study of the Commons has for a number of decades done stellar social-scientific research on traditional commons; yes, we have witnessed a strong emergence of a digital commons culture and movement; and yes, we have seen a number of activist charters, mostly connected to the alterglobalization movement, being pronounced in the last few years. And yes, also, we have witnessed the first stirrings of policy-oriented commons initiatives such as David Bollier at On The Commons, James Quilligan's Global Commons Trust, Silke Helfrich's pioneering publishing work on the topic with the Boll Foundation. Including the work at the P2P Foundation (http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Commons).

But the point is: these various emergent movements existed separately, did not mesh, and did not work globally on making the commons a reality in terms of politics and policy.

This then is the historical significance of the Berlin meet-up. That various branches of the commons movement, material and immaterial, met each other for an extensive dialogue, and for the most part, understood and acknowledged each other, even as many issues need to be debated and trashed out.

While a conference of this scale always has a number of glitches (the program was really over-ambitious for such a short time, though it succeeded in creating a believable framework around the main issues), and a tiny minority proved reluctant (a famous global water commons advocate refused to sit on the same panel with a digital commons hacker), most attendees entered in a open and deep dialogue, and came away with very positive experiences, re-energized. Even a number of jaded activists, who felt at times despondent about the state of activism of more traditional political approaches, felt new vistas were opening up.

So, in a nutshell, these are the achievements of the conference:

• The various constituent movements related to the commons met for the first time, entered in a serious dialogue and recognized the need for joint policy frameworks about the global commons. The wish to continue this conversation and constitute a intermeshed global movement was palpable
• Representatives of the government of Ecuador publicly committed themselves to reframe their policies in the context of the commons

The Commons Strategies Group is therefore committed to continue its work facilitating and supporting this emergence, and is in a process of consultation about the best ways of doing this.

My own feelings, not yet fully discussed within the CSG, about what needs to be done in the future are this:

• Continue the discussion with constituent groups, and perhaps strengthen the links with political ecology and ecological economics, traditional social justice movements (labour, farmers, etc..); strive for even more diversity next time
• Strengthen the representation of those movements that bridge the immaterial and material commons, such as those engaged in the global construction through open design of a new distributed manufacturing infrastructure for appropriate technology
• Find ways to interconnect policy makers and political sympathizers within legislative and policy-making bodies, around thematic areas; through a observatory, online and offline dialogue, and the identification of commons-oriented stakeholders in all domains of social life

Lots of things to do, but it is vital in terms of the re-orientation of our world from its current destructive combination of pseudo-abundance (infinite growth in limited material environments) and artificial scarcities (il-legalisation of global cooperation and innovation sharing through repressive IP laws)

The CSG would be dedicated to intermeshing the global dialogues around reframing issues around commons-oriented policy solutions.

Source: http://p2pfoundation.net/Emergence_of_a_Global_Commons_Movement,_Year_Zero

David Bollier, noted commons expert and author of Viral Spiral, gives one of the opening keynotes.

Where do conservative urbanists, liberal activists, and free culture advocates congregate? Last week it was in Berlin at the first ever International Commons Conference (ICC) held by the Commons Strategies Group and the Heinrich Boll Foundation. The combination of traditional and digital commons was explored as a transformational paradigm for the first time through an international conference in keynote addresses, conference tracks, breakout groups, and plenary sessions over two days.

Sometimes conferences are cultural interventions. This seemed the case with the ICC. The conference was timely in a couple of important ways. The economic and environmental crises have leaders looking beyond government and the market for solutions. And the commons have come to the fore because of Elinor Ostrom's Nobel win last year for her work on the commons and the recent ascent of digital commons. Together, traditional and digital commons offer a way forward that combines local traditions of stewardship with connection to global civil society. 

Barbara Unmubig, President of the Heinrich Boll Foundation, welcomed attendees highlighting the importance of the commons, as they, "could provide a catalyst for transition to a post-fossil era in which people actively help shape their lives and the environment they live in."  Indeed, a key thesis of the conference was that, "commons are the enabler for all other social goals, including environmental ones, which in essence are social."

In the keynote speech that followed, David Bollier suggested that attendees may look back on the conference as an historic moment when a diverse group of commoners began to reinvent the idea of the commons in a globalized context and connect isolated projects into a powerful movement. The richness of the dialog that followed certainly gave me the feeling that this was possible. 

The private, small group and plenary discussions were the most interesting to me for this reason. It was in these discussions that the different perspectives on the commons became most apparent, thus giving hints about how they might be combined into a more comprehensive worldview. Here are a few of the dividing lines I noticed during the conference:

• It seems that whenever people gather to discuss the commons, some time has to be spent defining them. The ICC was no exception. Part of one breakfast with Jay Walljasper and the On The Commons delegation was spent exploring the value of seeing the commons on a spectrum with pure commons at one end and private property at the other. Later, during an open space session on governing digital commons, it was pointed out to me that a set definition is important when government funding is tied to one. And at yet another session with Spanish speakers, I was told that there's really no word in Spanish for commons.

• There was much talk about the proper relationship between the market, the state, and the commons. On the one hand were the purists, who believe that commons should have no connection to the market. More moderate voices tended to think that markets are ancient human phenomenon just as commons are, and that they must somehow work together. During one of the open space sessions I attended, the group outlined a framework that could support commons. The idea was that commons need a strong an institutional support structure like markets have to be truly durable. In his keynote, Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation and the Commons Strategies Group summed up the proper relationship between the commons and the state saying that the state should support social production as a partner. 

• Another important axis was activist versus commons builders. Activists contended that the market poses a constant threat to commons and must be defended against vigorously. Free culture advocates and Transitioners had a different perspective: they feel that a good offense is the best defense. In other words, it may be easier to build anew what's wanted than change what exists. Then some others said that both approaches are needed.  Related to this axis was the understanding of commons as lifeboats in a crisis or an upgrade from our current situation.

• While Michel Bauwens expressed hope about combining the traditional and digital commons, I surprised that the cultural gap between digital and traditional commoners seemed fairly wide. And that gap didn't necessarily have to do with the critical fact that digital commoners interact with a non-rival resource and traditional commoners interact with a rival resource. For instance, on a train ride to visit a home healthcare coop in Berlin, Martin Pedersen explained that indigenous medicinal knowledge is place-based but that digital commoners see knowledge as abstracted from place. Another difference was the digital commoners see traditional commons as occurring naturally in contrast to digital commons which are constructed. This is despite the fact that all commons are social and ecological systems, even digital commons as they require natural resources stay alive. 

All in all, it was an eye-opening event which fulfilled its promise. It opened a new vista where participants could see how diverse commons project might work together thus laying a foundation for action.

RESOURCES:

• Conference wiki with agenda, notes from the open space, plenary notes, and participants
• The Commons - Prosperity by Sharing, an excellent overview of what commons are, why they matter, and a vision of a commons-based future.
• Videos of all the keynotes

Ruth Meizen-Dick, Silke Helfrich, and Michel Bauwens on a panel about commons as a transformational paradigm.

This post was originally published by Neal Gorenflo, @ShareableDesifn in Twittwer, on Shareable.net.

The International Commons Conference (ICC) which took place from Oct 31 to Nov 2 2010 in Berlin, was a mirror of the global commons movement. I try to outline this state from my viewpoint in ten theses.

1. The global commons movement exists as an assemblage of movements spread around the globe beginning to become aware of its global and interrelated character. As a global movement it is still establishing its own self-confidence rather than being a coherent agent.

2. The diversity of commons movements is their constitutive feature. They can be distinguished along numerous dimensions:

• Type of resources and products:
  - natural: water, atmosphere, fossil fuels, renewable energy etc.
  - produced: music, movies, texts, software, designs, hardware, infrastructures etc.
• Composition of resources and products:
  - material: natural goods, material products, digital carriers, infrastructures
  - non-material: knowledge, software, cultural goods
• Cultures of dealing with resources and products
  - traditional: indigenous experiences and practices
  - generated: digitally based communication
• Forms of self-organization ("governance")
  - independent autonomous
  - institutional oriented
• Relationship to market and state
  - affinity and connection to market and/or state
  - distance and independence from market and state

3. The diversity is expressed in different and partly opposing perceptions and approaches:

• preserving vs. generating commons
• natural vs. digital commons
• independent vs. market-oriented vs. state-oriented commons
• modifying market/state vs. replacing market/state
• local money vs. no money
• and much more

4. The different and opposing perceptions are mirroring the rudimentary stage of reflection and developing self-awareness. These are differences within the same.

5. What this same is wherein differences are visible is still unclear and will emerge stepwise as far as the practices of commons develop. Before that there is no necessity to move forward reflexively and theoretically. Learning by advancing. The further theses are thus speculative but justified.

6. The commons are objectively in opposition to capitalism, because they represent a different logic. Where they are successful, market can not evolve. Where they manage their own affairs, the state is not required.

7. The opposition against capitalist logic is commonly perceived but interpreted differently. The majority interprets commons as a supplement to market and state. The word "beyond" in the slogan "Commons Beyond Market and State" is read as "beside". This is a justified reading for the current stage of development.

8. At the same time the commons are the sublation of capitalism. The commons do not only practically occupy fields where a market cannot grow any longer or where the market is pushed to the periphery of free areas, but they bring a new way of societally producing livelihoods into the world, thus a new mode of production. The new mode of production is not a special one concerning the mentioned diverse areas, but a general one.

9. The Commons transcend capitalism in a fourfold way: ending, fulfilling, preserving, elevating. They end the logics of exclusion of capitalism and replace them with inclusion as social principle. They fulfill the promises of individual unfolding of personality. They preserve meaningful achievements and products. They elevate human needs to the norm of societal mediation and its satisfaction to the meaning of societal life.

10. Commons potentially being a new form of societal production do not guarantee that they become prevalent. Nothing happens by itself, it has to be done. The process of becoming aware just has begun. But it has begun.

Source: http://www.keimform.de/2010/ten-theses-about-global-commons-movement/

by Stefan Merentz

During the International Commons Conference in Berlin (Oct 31-Nov 2, 2010) I gave a keynote speech in the stream "The Generative Logic of the Commons" together with Roberto Verzola. I slidecasted (slides+audio) my talk which you can watch and listen to here:

If you wish to see me speaking at the desk "which isn't really interesting" you may switch to the Böll conference page and choose part 10. There you'll also find Robertos presentation (part 9) and all other ICC talks, which have been recorded. And I can recommend the discussion after Roberto's and my talk (part 11), which was loaded with a lot of critical but constructive energy

Source: http://www.keimform.de/2010/the-generative-logic-of-the-commons-slidecast/

1.  The Health Commons and Care of New Mexico's Uninsured    http://www.annfammed.org/content/4/suppl_1/S22.abstract    A seamless system of social, behavioral, and medical services for the uninsured was created to address the social determinants of disease, reduce health disparities, and foster local economic development in 2 inner-city neighborhoods and 2 rural counties in New Mexico.

2.  A Health Commons using p2p approach    http://claireot.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/a-health-commons-using-a-peer-t...

3.   Reliable Prosperity: The health of people and the ecosystems upon which they depend is inextricably linked. http://www.reliableprosperity.net/health.html

People dont care how much you know unless they know how much you care about them

By James Bernard Quilligan

Liberalism: The Implicit Tragedy of the Commons 

Excerpted from a draft of an article by Hilary Wainwright,  via Michel Bauwens:

Resistance to alienation takes many forms: from the refusal to work, humour, sabotage and conventional trade unionism, to a variety of struggles for and experiments with alternatives in and against state and market. An alternative conception of labour, as part of a wider alternative economics, will help us to understand and where appropriate generalise from and explore the potential of these scattered experiences, whether in public, private or civil spheres.

Are there theoretical tools developed in other contexts of the search for an alternative socially-framed economics that can help with such a rethinking?

Using the framework of the commons

The growing movement of thought and the diverse initiatives around the idea of the commons provide one source of inspiration worth exploring (though not a ready-made framework to be applied in a simplistic way).

The scope of commons thinking has widened tremendously in reaction to the incessant drive to commodify goods that had previously been held in common. These range from natural resources and services that historically have been taken out of the capitalist market and organised through public or civic organisations, such as health, education, science and, more generally, knowledge (libraries and archives, for example), to the newly-created digital commons, under constant threat of new enclosures.

At first sight, labour, understood in terms of the application of the human capacity to create, would seem profoundly individual and therefore inimical to organisation as a commons. On further reflection, though, human creativity, with its individual and social dimensions inextricably intertwined, is a distinctive commons that is key to the possibility of a commons-based political economy.

The writer and activist on the commons, Tomasso Fattori, traces the shared characteristics that make the framework of the commons useful for understanding the character of diverse phenomena, without artificially squeezing them into a category implying homogeneity. In an article reflecting on the wider significance of the successful struggle for the referendum vote in Italy on the future of water as a commons (‘a political and cultural revolution on the commons,’ as he describes it) Fattori says: ‘The commons are what is considered essential for life, understood not merely in the biological sense. They are the structures, which connect individuals to one another, tangible or intangible elements that we all have in common and which make us members of a society, not isolated entities in competition with each other. Elements that we maintain or reproduce together, according to rules established by the community: an area to be rescued from the decision-making of the post-democratic élite and which needs to be self-governed through forms of participative democracy.’ (Fattori 2011)

In the light of these reflections, does it make sense, is it useful, to think of labour as a commons?

These conditions for a commons could apply to human creativity on a basis that would not deny its irreducibly individual dimension. Rather, this individual dimension of what depends for its nature, realisation and wider social benefits on the way that society is organised, poses – as do all commons – specific problems of organisation and governance.

Consider the human capacity to create, with Fattori’s definition in mind. It is a capacity that is shared by all humanity – indeed it is what makes us human; a capacity that is a powerful social force, a necessary condition of the life of many other commons; and which, though in one unique moment is individual-centered is also socially shaped. Dependent in good part on the nature of education, culture and distribution of wealth, it can be nurtured and developed or suppressed, undeveloped and wasted. It is socially realised (whether or not this distributed potential is achieved depends on the nature of the social relations of production, communication and distribution) and socially benefited from (who in society benefits from the creativity of others again depends on the economic, political and social relations).

Perhaps we could draw on Marx’s contrast between the bee and the architect indirectly to reinforce the point about human creativity as a particular kind of commons. If we were like bees, then we and our product might be part of the natural commons – with beekeepers as the custodians, cultivators of the commons. But as the equivalent of architects, with the capacity to imagine and to create according to our imagination, we embody a different kind of commons: the commons of creativity.

Of course human creativity is not new! But mass awareness – self-awareness and full social recognition – of creativity as a universal potential, is the result of cultural changes of material consequence. It has been accompanied by increasing conscious attention to the institutional implications of this recognition. I will touch on both of these in the next section of this chapter. I am thinking here especially of the steady, albeit uneven, rise over the past 40 years or so of an insistence, in practice, on cultural equality, in addition to the long tradition of demands for economic and political equality. Additionally, the widespread transcendence of a dichotomy between individual and collective and the emergence of both a social individualism and an associational understanding of collective organisation has helped to lay the basis of understanding creativity as a commons.

Reclaiming the tradition of Ubuntu

Again, this social individualism is not new. In many ways, it is a reconnection, from the circumstances of struggling in and against 21st-century capitalism, with the ethical tradition of Ubuntu. ‘You are a person because of other people,’ as a delegate to the Solidarity Economy Conference that led to this book put it. Or as Archbishop Tutu explains: ‘Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness.’

By naming this creative capacity, this characteristic of all of humanity, as a commons, by highlighting its social as well as individual character and the associative, social conditions of its realisation, we also lay the basis for reclaiming the products of this capacity. These include those that in a certain sense have been appropriated by the state or by capital – such as ‘social capital’ and other forms of ‘free labour’ that are so vital to today’s informational capitalism.

Another implication for our own organisations, political and economic, is the importance of building into them the nurturing and development of this commons. We need to do this in both a prefigurative sense and as an immediate means of strengthening their transformative capacity.

To develop and apply the idea of labour/creativity as a commons, it is important to think of it as a collection of useful tools to be ingeniously deployed, rather than the comprehensive, ready-to-assemble solution that the idea of socialism was often treated as. Here are some of the kinds of tools it might provide.

First, it opens up ways of seeing and understanding the wider potential of existing practices in the solidarity economy in achieving transformative gains in the broader social, public and private economy. An example here would be the importance of learning through and reflecting on practice; thinking of creativity as a commons leads to asking how we could envisage economic arrangements that build self-development, education and regeneration into daily life across what is now divided into work, consumption and personal life.

Understanding labour and the potential of human creativity as a commons changes our view of employment. We can see this already in practice in parts of the solidarity economy where workers are never seen as ‘redundant’ and the aim is always redeployment and retraining. We also see how the scandalous waste of human creativity now evident in capitalist economies across the world has been a driving motive in the explosion of resistance from 2011 onwards, led often by the young unemployed. (Mason 2012)

Human creativity as a commons also points to the importance of thinking at many different levels of economic and social relations and of inter-connecting them. So it leads to asking what institutional conditions for nurturing and realising creativity might mean at a micro level for how enterprises or urban spaces, for example, are organised; what it might mean at a macro level in terms of, for example, a means of livelihood beyond or autonomous from waged labour (what some have called ‘a basic wage’); and what it could mean at a mix of micro and macro levels – for example, in terms of legislative frameworks for the organisation of time. (Coote 2010)

In this way seeing labour as a commons challenges tendencies towards enterprise or community egoism or atomism (a tendency in parts of the social economy as well as in capitalist enterprises) and emphasises the importance of solidarity and flows of mutuality between different elements of attempts at a solidarity and commons-based economy. More generally, it provides the basis for a strong antidote to the possessive individualism that has been so rampant in recent years, without counterposing a reified collectivism. (Macpherson 1964)

Institutional design

A further tool generated by the idea of human creativity as a commons is the means of institutional flexibility to negotiate and live permanently with the tensions between the collaborative dimension of creativity and the varying necessity for individual autonomy, introversion and self-reflexivity. This flexibility and ability to value the duality of human creativity and therefore social well-being is often missing not only from a statist understanding of socialism but from many conceptions of collectivity in the labour and co-operative movements.

The creative commons licence is a good illustration of how it is possible to recognise and value the dimension of individual creativity (and with it a certain sense of ownership) and at the same time protect both the individual and the wider community against the worst consequences of taking a creation out of the commons and into the commodity market. (Berlinguer in this volume)

A combination of these tools could help with institutional design in the solidarity economy, able to deal with a complex of factors. Here I can draw from my own experience of a solidarity economy media enterprise, Red Pepper magazine, an institution based on a multiplicity of interconnecting interests. Its organisational design has to recognise a diversity of sources of support, monetary and in kind, some from organisations, some from individuals, all of whom expect some accountability. It also has to recognise several sources of creativity, the importance of a collaborative editorial process and yet the dimension of individual decision-making at different levels of the project, and at the same time meet the need for a relatively coherent identity. The notion of creativity as a commons seems key to developing a sufficiently flexible, transparent and constantly negotiable form of governance to deal with this complex combination of interests and imperatives.”

Excerpted from a draft of an article by Hilary Wainwright,  via Michel Bauwens:

Another implication for our own organisations, political and economic, is the importance of building into them the nurturing and development of this commons. We need to do this in both a prefigurative sense and as an immediate means of strengthening their transformative capacity.

To develop and apply the idea of labour/creativity as a commons, it is important to think of it as a collection of useful tools to be ingeniously deployed, rather than the comprehensive, ready-to-assemble solution that the idea of socialism was often treated as. Here are some of the kinds of tools it might provide.

First, it opens up ways of seeing and understanding the wider potential of existing practices in the solidarity economy in achieving transformative gains in the broader social, public and private economy. An example here would be the importance of learning through and reflecting on practice; thinking of creativity as a commons leads to asking how we could envisage economic arrangements that build self-development, education and regeneration into daily life across what is now divided into work, consumption and personal life.

Understanding labour and the potential of human creativity as a commons changes our view of employment. We can see this already in practice in parts of the solidarity economy where workers are never seen as ‘redundant’ and the aim is always redeployment and retraining. We also see how the scandalous waste of human creativity now evident in capitalist economies across the world has been a driving motive in the explosion of resistance from 2011 onwards, led often by the young unemployed. (Mason 2012)

Human creativity as a commons also points to the importance of thinking at many different levels of economic and social relations and of inter-connecting them. So it leads to asking what institutional conditions for nurturing and realising creativity might mean at a micro level for how enterprises or urban spaces, for example, are organised; what it might mean at a macro level in terms of, for example, a means of livelihood beyond or autonomous from waged labour (what some have called ‘a basic wage’); and what it could mean at a mix of micro and macro levels – for example, in terms of legislative frameworks for the organisation of time. (Coote 2010)

In this way seeing labour as a commons challenges tendencies towards enterprise or community egoism or atomism (a tendency in parts of the social economy as well as in capitalist enterprises) and emphasises the importance of solidarity and flows of mutuality between different elements of attempts at a solidarity and commons-based economy. More generally, it provides the basis for a strong antidote to the possessive individualism that has been so rampant in recent years, without counterposing a reified collectivism. (Macpherson 1964)

More on this, here.

12 big lessons we've learned, by Alexa Bradley & Julie Ristau

If the cell form of capitalism is the commodity, the cellular form of a society beyond capital is the commons. Nick Dyer-Witheford discusses the circulation of commons and the conditions they would create for new collective projects and waves of organising.

It has been eight lean years for the movement of movement since its Seattle high point of 1999. Since September 11th 2001 many activists’ energies have been directed to opposing the invasion and occupation of Iraq, other conflicts in Afghanistan and Lebanon, and abuses of civil liberties and media truth. But the war on terror has also had a deadening effect on oppositional hopes and imagination. Or so it seems to me, an academic in Canada whose political energies have recently been absorbed opposing his university’s making tanks for the US Army. Comrades are engaged in labour organising, post-carbon planning, the self-organisation of the homeless, municipal elections and other projects. But the optimistic sense of another world as not only possible but probable, imminent, has given way to something more sombre. Even in this no-longer-frozen North, the upsurge of popular movements and governments in Latin America is an inspiration. Otherwise, however, horizons have contracted.

Global capitalism appears – by profit levels – robust. Cascading ecological calamities, suddenly peaking oil, another 9/11, or an uncontrolled unwinding of US-China relations could all destabilise the world system. But not only are such scenarios contingent; it is uncertain they would be to the advantage of progressive movements. Neo-fascists, fundamentalists and martial law capitalists could be the beneficiaries, unless intellectual and organisational preparation lays the ground for a better alternative.

It therefore seems important to renew the discussion of what we want: to think through not just what we are against, but what we are fighting for (and hence who ‘we’ are), and to consider what might be plausibly achieved in present circumstances. Many movement activists and intellectuals are currently addressing this task, here and in other forums. My contribution will be to propose and discuss ‘commonism’.

‘Commons’ is a word that sums up many of the aspirations of the movement of movements. It is a popular term perhaps because it provides a way of talking about collective ownership without invoking a bad history – that is, without immediately conjuring up, and then explaining (away) ‘communism’, conventionally understood as a centralised command economy plus a repressive state. Though some will disagree, I think this distinction is valid; it is important to differentiate our goals and methods from those of past catastrophes, while resuming discussions of a society beyond capitalism.

The initial reference of ‘commons’ is to the collective lands enclosed by capitalism in a process of primitive accumulation running from the middle ages to the present. Such common agrarian lands are still a flashpoint of struggle in many places. But today commons also names the possibility of collective, rather than private ownership in other domains: an ecological commons (of water, atmosphere, fisheries and forests); a social commons (of public provisions for welfare, health, education and so on); a networked commons (of access to the means of communication).
Let us extend this term ‘commons’ in a slightly unfamiliar way. Marx suggested capitalism has a cell-form, a basic building block, from which all its apparatus of commerce and command are elaborated. This cell form was the commodity, a good produced for sale between private owners.

If the cell form of capitalism is the commodity, the cellular form of a society beyond capital is the common. A commodity is a good produced for sale, a common is a good produced, or conserved, to be shared. The notion of a commodity, a good produced for sale, presupposes private owners between whom this exchange occurs. The notion of the common presupposes collectivities – associations and assemblies – within which sharing is organised. If capitalism presents itself as an immense heap of commodities, ‘commonism’ is a multiplication of commons.
The forces of the common and the commodity – of the movement and the market – are currently in collision across the three spheres we mentioned before: the ecological, the social and the networked.

In the ecological sphere, decades of green struggle have disclosed how the market’s depletion and pollution of nature destroys the common basis of human life. This destruction runs from pesticide poisoning to clear-cutting to species-extinctions. What now highlights this process is global warming. The prospect of chaotic climate change destroying agriculture, water supply and coastland around the planet (although, as usual, most devastatingly in the South) throws into sharp relief the scale of ecological crisis. It also definitively displays the inadequacy of the ‘free market’ and its price system as a social steering system. The scale of intervention now necessary is indicated by George Monbiot’s recent ten-point plan to address global warming: targets for rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, borne primarily by the developed North; individual carbon quotas; high-energy efficiency building regulation; banning and taxation of high-emission devices; diversion of public funds from ‘defence’ and road building to clean energy and public transport systems; freezes and reductions in air travel and out of town superstores. One can debate every point in this prescription. But if Monbiot is even close to correct, the remedy required exceeds anything the market, even as ‘green business’, can do. It demands regulation, rationing and major public investment. Global warming (alongside other ecological crises, from fish stocks to water tables) puts back on the table precisely what neoliberalism attempted to erase: massive social planning.

In the social sphere, the red thread of labour, socialist and communist movements traces the attempt to replace the class divisions of capitalism with various forms of common wealth. Defeating this challenge was the mission of neoliberalism. It has had great success. Precisely because of this, intensifying global inequalities are now having universal consequences. The afflictions of what Mike Davis calls the ‘planet of slums’ cannot be walled off from the planet of malls. They return as disease (HIV/AIDS and other pandemics) or insurgency (‘terror’). In this context, two movement initiatives have picked up the issue of ‘common wealth’ in innovative ways. One is the movement of ‘solidarity economics’ focused on cooperative enterprises of various sorts and associated with the success of the Latin American left. I discuss this later. The other is a set of proposals and campaigns around what is variously known as a ‘basic’ or ‘guaranteed’ income, which, by assuring a modest level of subsistence, saves human life from utter dependence on a global labour market. Such programmes also address feminist political economists’ point about the market’s systemic non-reward of reproductive work (care of children and households). Basic income was initially proposed in the global North West, and in that context can be criticised as a supplement to an already-affluent welfare state. But basic income has recently appeared as a policy initiative in Brazil and South Africa. Some groups have proposed and costed a basic global income of $1 a day. Insignificant in a North American context, this would double the monetary income of the one billion plus people officially designated as living in extreme poverty. If one thinks this utopian, consider the $532 billion 2007 US defence budget. Again, there are more than enough debates to be had about a global basic income: it might, for example, be better conceived not as a cash economy payment but as a basic ‘basket of goods’ or a guaranteed global livelihood. But the failure of trickle-down market solutions to poverty and inequality (even in the midst of a global boom), and the increasing extremity of the consequences, creates opportunities for new common-wealth activism.

In the network sphere, the failure of the market appears in a different way – as capital’s inability to make use of new technological resources. Computers and networks have created the increasing capacities for extremely fast, very cheap circulation of communication and knowledge. These innovations were made outside of the market, in a strange encounter between public funded science (the military/academic sector) and libertarian (and sometimes revolutionary) hackers. Capital’s contribution has been to try and stuff these innovations back within the commodity form, realising their powers only within the boundaries of information property and market pricing. But digital innovation has persistently over-spilled these limits. Peer-to-peer networks and free and open source software movements have taken advantage of the possibilities for the reproduction of non-rivalrous goods and collaborative production to generate networked culture whose logic contradicts commercial axioms. The movement of movements realised these potentials in its early weaving of what Harry Cleaver called an ‘electronic fabric of struggle,’ using the internet to circumvent corporate media and circulate news, analysis and solidarity. Increasingly, however, free and open source software and P2P constitute an electronic fabric of production, equipping people with a variety of digital tools for everything from radio broadcasts to micro-manufacturing. Capital is attempting to repress these developments – through incessant anti-piracy sweeps and intellectual property (IP) battles – or co-opt them. But alternatives beyond what it will allow are expressed in ‘creative commons’, ‘free cooperation’ and ‘open cultures’ movements contesting the intellectual property regime of the world market.

All three domains – ecological, social and networked – evidence major market failures. Each illustrates the failures of a commodity regime, though in distinct ways. Ecological disaster is the revenge of the market’s so-called negative externalities, that is, the harms whose price is not, and indeed cannot be, calculated in commercial transactions. Intensifying inequality, with immiseration amidst plenitude, displays the self-reinforcing feedback loops of deprivation and accumulation intrinsic to market operations. Networks show the market’s inability to accommodate its own positive externalities, that is, to allow the full benefits of innovations when they overflow market price mechanisms. Together, all three constitute a historical indictment of neoliberalism, and of the global capitalist system of which it is only the latest, cutting-edge, doctrine.

Also in all three domains, movements are proposing, as alternatives to these market failures, new forms of commons. These too vary in each domain, although, as I will argue in a moment, they also overlap and connect. In the ecological sphere, commons provisions are based primarily on conservation and regulation (but also on public funding of new technologies and transportation systems). In the social sphere, a global guaranteed livelihood entails a commons built on redistribution of wealth, while solidarity economies create experimental collectively-managed forms of production. In the case of the networked commons, what is emerging is a commons of abundance, of non-rivalrous information goods – a cornucopian commons.

Of course, these three spheres are in reality not separable; any life-activity resonates in all three, so that, for example, ecological and networked activities are always social commons – and vice-versa. Indeed, my argument is that the form of a new social order, commonism, can be seen only in the interrelation and linkage of these domains – in a circulation of the common.
Marx showed how in capitalism, commodities moved in a circuit. Money is used to purchase labour, machinery and raw materials. These are thrown into production, creating new commodities that are sold for more money, part of which is retained as profit, and part used to purchase more means of production to make more commodities… repeat ad infinitum. Different kinds of capital – mercantile, industrial and financial – played different roles in this circuit. So, for example, the transformation of commodities into money is the role of merchant capital, involved in trade; actual production is conducted by industrial capital; and the conversion of money capital into productive capital is the task of financial capital (banks, etc).

We need to think in terms of the circulation of commons, of the interconnection and reinforcements between them. The ecological commons maintains the finite conditions necessary for both social and networked commons. A social commons, with a tendency towards a equitable distribution of wealth, preserves the ecological commons, both by eliminating the extremes of environmental destructiveness linked to extremes of wealth (SUVs, incessant air travel) and poverty (charcoal burning, deforestation for land) and by reducing dependence on ‘trickle down’ from unconstrained economic growth. Social commons also create the conditions for the network commons, by providing the context of basic health, security and education within which people can access new and old media. A network commons in turn circulates information about the condition of both ecological and social commons (monitoring global environmental conditions, tracking epidemics, enabling exchanges between health workers, labour activists or disaster relief teams). Networks also provide the channels for planning ecological and social commons – organising them, resolving problems, considering alternative proposals. They act as the fabric of the association that is the sine qua non of any of the other commons.

Let’s suppose that a publicly-funded education institution (social commons) produces software and networks that are available to an open source collective (networked commons), which creates free software used by an agricultural cooperative to track its use of water and electricity (ecological commons). This is a micro model of the circulation of the common.

This is a concept of the common that is not defensive, not limited to fending off the depredations of capital on ever-diminishing collective space. Rather it is aggressive and expansive: proliferating, self-strengthening and diversifying. It is also a concept of heterogeneous collectivity, built from multiple forms of a shared logic, a commons of singularities. We can talk of common earth, a common wealth and common networks; or of commons of land (in its broadest sense, comprising the biosphere), labour (in its broadest sense, comprising reproductive and productive work) and language (in its broadest sense, comprising all means of information, communication and knowledge exchange). It is through the linkages and bootstrapped expansions of these commons that commonism emerges.

This concept has a clear affinity with the movements of solidarity economics that emerged from Latin America and are now gaining increasing attention in North America and Europe. Broadly defined, these aim to link self-managed and worker-owned collectives, cooperative financial organisations and socially-responsible consumption practices to create expanding economic networks whose surpluses are invested in social and ecological regeneration. Euclides Mance, one of the theorists of the movement, writes of such ‘socially based cooperation networks’ reinforcing their component parts until ‘progressive boosting’ enables them to move from a ‘secondary, palliative or complementary sphere of activity’ to become a ‘socially hegemonic mode of production’. This type of activity – to which, I think, basic income programmes would be complementary – seems to resemble the sort of cell-growth of commons envisaged here.

Mance says that this process is ‘not about the political control of the State by society’, but about ‘the democratic control of the economy by society’. Latin American activists will, however, be much better aware than I that the creation of grass roots alternative networks goes better with protection, support and even initiation at a state level. For that reason, one might think of the circulation of the common as involving not only a lateral circuit between ecological, social and networked domains, but also a vertical circuit between new subjectivities, autonomous assemblies (solidarity networks, cooperatives, environmental and community groupings) and governmental agencies.

The movement of movements has been tacitly split between autonomist and anarchist groups, with strong anti-statist perspectives, and socialist and social democratic movements, committed to governmental planning and welfare functions. Rather than either repressing this tension, or replaying it ad infinitum, it may be both more interesting for both sides and closer to the real practice of many activists to think about the potential interplay of these two poles.

Commons projects are projects of planning: the regulation of carbon emissions (or other ecological pollutants), the distribution of a basic income (or of public health or education) or the establishment of networked infrastructures are all extremely difficult on any large scale without the exercise of governmental power.

The nightmare of previously existing socialisms was the assumption by this governmental planning power of despotic bureaucratic forms. The antidote is a pluralistic planning processes, which involves a multiplicity of non-state organisations capable of proposing, debating and democratically determining what directions governmental planning takes. Thus a requirement of ‘commonist’ government is the cultivation of the conditions in which autonomous assemblies can emerge to countervail against bureaucracy and despotism, and provide diversity and innovation in planning ideas. Planning and anti-planning have to be built into each other: there should always be, to quote Raymond Williams, at least two plans.

As George Caffentzis has pointed out, neoliberal capital, confronting the debacle of free market policies, is now turning to a ‘Plan B’, in which limited versions of environmental planning terms (e.g. pollution trading schemes) community development and open-source and file sharing practices are introduced as subordinate aspects of a capitalist economy. But the question hanging over this encounter is which logic will envelope and subordinate the other: who will subsume who?

Commonism scales. That is, it can and must be fought for at micro and macro, molecular and molar, levels; in initiatives of individual practice, community projects and very large scale movements. If the concept is at all meaningful, it is only because millions of people are already in myriad ways working to defend and create commons of different sorts, from community gardens to peer-to-peer networks.

In my view, however, a commonist project would gain coherence and focus by agreement on a set of high level demands to be advanced in the ecological, social and network spheres at the national and international level, demands that could be supported by many movements even as they pursue other more local and specific struggles and projects. These demands might include some briefly discussed here: for example, a guaranteed global livelihood, carbon-emission rationing and adoption of free and open-source software in public institutions.

Such demands would be radical but not, in a negative sense, utopian. Success would not mean we had won: it is conceivable that capitalism could persist with these provisions, although they would represent a planetary ‘New Deal’ of major proportions. But achieving them would mean, first, that the movement of movements had won something, averting harms to, and bestowing benefits on millions; and, second, it would mean that we were winning: these altered conditions would create opportunities for new collective projects and waves of organising that could effect deeper transformations, and the institutions of new commons.

It might be objected that, in Marx’s description of the inner workings of capitalism, the commodity is presented as possessing a self-creating, self-reproducing dynamism, and that the fact that some commons – especially the ecological ones – are finite would prevent such dynamism. But this objection confuses a qualitative with a quantitative issue, or, more accurately, a social dynamism with a dynamism of production. The model proposed here, of circular interaction between ecological planning, basic income and open networks, argues for the expansion of the social relations of the commons: a secure level of livelihood for global populations reduces the need for constant environmentally destructive growth; open networks enable ecological and income planning to be democratically debated, monitored and revised in an ongoing collective process of general intellect; planning in turn ensures the infrastructures and access for this process. Whether or not this social dynamism would be productively dynamic – whether it would produce more or less goods – is a different question, to which the answer is surely ‘more of some, less of others’: less SUVs, energy mega projects and luxury mega-homes, more public transport, solar panels and decent basic housing. But the commons form, like the commodity form, is first and foremost a social relation, and its most important dynamism lies in the alteration of collective logics.

A computer, say, is a ‘rival’ or ‘rivalrous’ good. My possession of it deprives you of it. But goods like software are ‘nonrivalrous’. A piece of software can be copied costlessly and therefore we can both use it simultaneously.

Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler to describe a new model of economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the Internet) into large, meaningful projects mostly without traditional hierarchical organization (and often, but not always, without or with decentralized financial compensation). Often used interchangeably with the term social production, Benkler compares commons-based peer production to firm production (where a centralized decision process decides what has to be done and by whom) and market-based production (when tagging different prices to different jobs serves as an attractor to anyone interested in doing the job).

After the highly successful 1st International Commons Conference there will be another international conference focused on the Economics of the Commons in Berlin, May 2013.  

Organized by the Commons Strategies Group (with support of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung and the FPH – Fondation pour le Progrès de l’Homme), there was a preparatory meeting for that, in Bangkok, October 12-14. The following text outlining some key issues was prepared by the Commons Strategies Group, for the Bangkok meeting.

“In addressing the themes raised by economics and the commons, our workshop will deliberately use a flexible and open-ended format. We do not wish to present an fixed, structured agenda so much as elicit your special knowledge and perspectives on the topic. In previous gatherings on the commons, we have found this a highly effective way to surface ideas, identify major points of disagreement and consensus, and develop a more coherent understanding of the challenges we face.

Having said that, we have assembled below a series of themes and questions that may be useful in spurring discussion. This is an incomplete “discussion draft” of issues that will likely deserve attention (in this and further conversations). But this list should not be regarded as a comprehensive, prioritized or “correct”; it is merely as a springboard for discussion. We urge you to bring your own ideas, open questions and issues so that we can collectively decide how the discussions should proceed. We are confident that this process will help us highlight fundamental ideas and develop new narratives and projects.

We would like to start our workshop by addressing the basic questions: What does a commons-based economy consist of? What are its basic principles and how can we “know it when we see it”? Does it require specific (infra)structures, principles and policy approaches?

Some commons scholars suggest that a commons-based economy is one that combines production, consumption and governance into a unified needs-based system, such that it is impossible to distinguish among them. Another definition is that production cannot be distinguished from reproduction because everything contributes to the reproduction of livelihoods. Perhaps there are other salient features of a commons-based economy that we should identify and explore.

Some specific issues worth exploring:

THE ONTOLOGY AND THE VALUE PROPOSITION OF THE COMMONS

• Why and how does a commons generate value? Let’s get down to some basics of the human condition and relationships (ontology) and knowledge categories (epistemology) to understand the value-proposition of the commons.

• The very idea of “the economy” is a social construction, not a natural fact. Yet if we wish to transcend the familiar paradigm of “the economy” – i.e., the capitalist market and its logic – what are the handful of key principles that let us define a commons-based “economy”?

• What is the purpose of a commons-based economy? How can we starkly differentiate the commons worldview and provisioning model from that of market economics?

• How do the processes and social relationships of the commons differ from those of the market, and how does this matter? Can we consider this from an anthropological perspective?

• Are there identifiable typologies of commons? Do these conform to types of resources, cultural patterns, or something else? For political purposes, we may wish to assert a universal template of commoning (“principles of commoning”) and declare that the type of resource is a secondary matter. But is this entirely true?

• Can any general statement be made about the ontological power of the commons – i.e., how and why it self-organizes, generates value and innovates? Or is a commons destined always to be a subsidiary form that is necessarily embedded in markets and the state and dependent on them?

• How do commons protect themselves from free riders and abuse? What sorts of technological, legal or social innovations can work?

• How can the yearning for collective management and participation be “locked in” and secured?

• How do commons get started in the first place? Can we identify general differences between commons and commoning in the global North (which is “rediscovering” the commons) as opposed to the global South (where commoning has a long, deep and continuous history)?

CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE COMMONS

How does the debate on commons-based economy relate to those of…

–feminist economy, especially the care economy and the subsistence economy;

–the Solidarity economy;

–the Transition Town movement

–gift economies (academia, blood and organ banks, community groups)

–the degrowth-debate

–Buddhist economy or other discourses present in the region

What can we learn from these various economies? Where are the overlaps and where the differences?

THE COMMONS AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

• What role can the commons play in arresting relentless economic growth, and how?

• What are some practical, incremental scenarios for using the commons to reduce growth and internalize externalities (without falling into the trap of market-based mechanisms that favor monetization of the value of nature or reproductive work)?

• Is a commons-based economy and peer production a force for “de-materializing” the economy? If so, how?

THE STATE AND THE COMMONS

• How can the personal engagement and informal nature of the commons (in its canonical form) be preserved if the state is involved with it?

• How might we conceptualize a State that “enables the commons”? What are the politics of such a scenario?

• Does the formalization of a commons and external legal/financial support for it undermine the social practices and relationships that lie at the heart of a commons? If so, how can commons design themselves to be quasi-autonomous while securing support (or at least, non-interference) from the market/state duopoly?

• Michel Bauwens has proposed the idea of the “partner state” and a triarchy of governance in which market, state and commons co-exist and support each other. Is this a realistic vision, and if so, how might this vision be advanced?

MARKETS AND COMMONS

Tell us about a particularly stable or popular commons in your country or region. Explain why it has succeeded and what impact it has.

• How does a commons interact with markets or not?

• If the commons is primarily a nonmarket form of provisioning, can it have any fruitful relationship with markets? If so, what sorts of limits or protections are needed to assure the long-term integrity of a commons? How can they be maintained?

• What are the patterns by which commons and market activity can interact constructively? Or are they necessarily hostile and adversarial?

• Given the structural economic and policy biases against recognizing the value of infrastructure-as-commons, how can commoners secure necessary infrastructure – roads, telecom, water, land, Internet – as commons?

LABOR AND MONEY IN THE COMMONS

• What does work, productive activity and labor mean in the context of a commons?

• Can money be converted into a commons?

• Is it possible (and desirable) to de-commodify them? If so, why?

• What are the viable alternative models?”

SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF A COMMONS-BASED ECONOMY

• Does a commons necessarily reduce inequality or what circumstances are needed to do so?

• What can make a commons socially regressive?

• What about people who do not have the education or basic resources to participate in commons (e.g., Internet commons)?

• Why and how does a commons foster social justice, stability and sustainability?

• Doesn’t a commons reduce incentives to work hard and innovate?

• Does the commons promote unsustainable live-styles? (e.g., a 3D printer for everyone!)

• How can the social solidarity and cooperation of a commons persist as it scales (i.e, as coordination and communication becomes more difficult)? Or perhaps there are different “tiers” of commons that should be regarded differently – much as a “state trustee commons” will differ from a small-scale tribal commons for water?

ALTERNATIVE ECONOMIC MOVEMENTS AND STRATEGIES FOR MOVING FORWARD

• Who are the key thinkers and activists involved in developing alternative economic paradigms that work and are philosophically coherent?

• What are some of the key alternative economic organizations and movements?

• How to “bridge” with them?

• How do we begin to develop actual projects to advance a commons-based economy?

• What sorts of knowledge, networks of people and organizations, and experiences are needed?

Miscellaneous

On the Internet:

• Can we make any useful generalizations about the differences and commonalities between open platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) and digital commons (Wikipedia, open-access journals, collaborative archives)?

• Are open platforms helpful to a commons-based economy or mostly a means for corporate co-optation of social sharing and collaboration?

• Should we consider “open business models” a form of commoning (where open networked platforms are used to leverage social sharing) – or are they mostly a capitalistic form that seeks to exploit open networks?

• Should commoners welcome open business models or regard them with suspicion? What factors might affect a determination?

• If inalienability is important to preserving a commons – i.e., a community-managed resource that may not be monetized – then how can this be accomplished in reliable, lasting ways? How can we link inalienability with the value proposition of the commons?

Localism and commons:

• Is a commons necessarily local? And if a commons can work at larger scales, how does subsidiarity actually work?

The commons and a theory of power and hierarchy:

We should not succumb to romanticized visions of happy egalitarianism within commons. Issues of power relations must be addressed.

• Do commons empower people to break down predatory or hierarchical power relationships?

• Are there certain structures of power and governance within a commons that are essential?

• Can we imagine a typology of commons-based governance structures?

Workable commons seem to imply a different sort of culture than those associated with markets. But how and why do commons produce a different sort of culture?

Does a commons-based society entail a different form of spirituality or religion? Is institutionalized religion (which implies hierarchies and imposed norms) part of the problem today?”

Source: P2P Foundtion Blog

A stirring call to unite the environmental and global justice movement from Maude Barlow

Maude Barlow gave this stirring plenary speech, full of hope even in the face of ecological disasters, to the Environmental Grantmakers Association annual retreat in Pacific Grove, California. 

Sections

• Every now and then in history, the human race takes a collective step forward in its evolution. Such a time is upon us now
• We Simply Cannot Continue on the Present Path 
• Two Problems that Hinder the Environmental Movement
• How the Commons Fits In
• Inspiring Successes Around the Globe
• What Can We Do Right Now?
• How Clean Water Became a Human Right

“Every now and then in history, the human race takes a collective step forward in its evolution. Such a time is upon us now.”

We all know that the earth and all upon it face a growing crisis. Global climate change is rapidly advancing, melting glaciers, eroding soil, causing freak and increasingly wild storms, and displacing untold millions from rural communities to live in desperate poverty in peri-urban slums. Almost every human victim lives in the global South, in communities not responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. The atmosphere has already warmed up almost a full degree in the last several decades and a new Canadian study reports that we may be on course to add another 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.

Half the tropical forests in the world – the lungs of our ecosystems – are gone; by 2030, at the current rate of harvest, only 10% 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 left.” Half the world’s wetlands – the kidneys of our ecosystems – were destroyed in the 20th century. Species extinction is taking place at a rate one thousand times greater than before humans existed. According to a Smithsonian scientist, we are headed toward a “biodiversity deficit” in which species and ecosystems will be destroyed at a rate faster than Nature can create new ones.

We are polluting our lakes, rivers and streams to death. Every day, 2 million tons of sewage and industrial and agricultural waste are discharged into the world’s water, the equivalent of the weight of the entire human population of 6.8 billion people. The amount of wastewater produced annually is about six times more water than exists in all the rivers of the world. A comprehensive new global study recently reported that 80% of the world’s rivers are now in peril, affecting 5 billion people on the planet. We are also mining our groundwater far faster than nature can replenish it, sucking it up to grow water-guzzling chemical-fed crops in deserts or to water thirsty cities that dump an astounding 200 trillion gallons of land-based water as waste in the oceans every year. The global mining industry sucks up another 200 trillion gallons, which it leaves behind as poison. Fully one third of global water withdrawals are now used to produce biofuels, enough water to feed the world. A recent global survey of groundwater found that the rate of depletion more than doubled in the last half century. If water was drained as rapidly from the Great Lakes, they would be bone dry in 80 years.

The global water crisis is the greatest ecological and human threat humanity has ever faced. As Vast areas of the planet are becoming desert as we suck the remaining waters out of living ecosystems and drain remaining aquifers in India, China, Australia, most of Africa, all of the Middle East, Mexico, Southern Europe, US Southwest and other places. Dirty water is the biggest killer of children; every day more children die of water borne disease than HIV/AIDS, malaria and war together. In the global South, dirty water kills a child every three and a half seconds. And it is getting worse, fast. By 2030, global demand for water will exceed supply by 40%— an astounding figure foretelling of terrible suffering.

Knowing there will not be enough food and water for all in the near future, wealthy countries and global investment, pension and hedge funds are buying up land and water, fields and forests in the global South, creating a new wave of invasive colonialism that will have huge geo-political ramifications. Rich investors have already bought up an amount of land double the size of the United Kingdom in Africa alone.

We Simply Cannot Continue on the Present Path

I do not think it possible to exaggerate the threat to our earth and every living thing upon it. Quite simply we cannot continue on the path that brought us here. Einstein said that problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. While mouthing platitudes about caring for the earth, most of our governments are deepening the crisis with new plans for expanded resource exploitation, unregulated free trade deals, more invasive investment, the privatization of absolutely everything and unlimited growth. This model of development is literally killing the planet.

Unlimited growth assumes unlimited resources, and this is the genesis of the crisis. Quite simply, to feed the increasing demands of our consumer based system, humans have seen nature as a great resource for our personal convenience and profit, not as a living ecosystem from which all life springs. So we have built our economic and development policies based on a human-centric model and assumed either that nature would never fail to provide or that, where it does fail, technology will save the day.

Two Problems that Hinder the Environmental Movement

From the perspective of the environmental movement, I see two problems that hinder us in our work to stop this carnage. The first is that, with notable exceptions, most environmental groups either have bought into the dominant model of development or feel incapable of changing it. The main form of environmental protection in industrialized countries is based on the regulatory system, legalizing the discharge of large amounts of toxics into the environment. Environmentalists work to minimize the damage from these systems, essentially fighting for inadequate laws based on curbing the worst practices, but leaving intact the system of economic globalization at the heart of the problem. Trapped inside this paradigm, many environmentalists essentially prop up a deeply flawed system, not imagining they are capable of creating another.

Hence, the support of false solutions such as carbon markets, which, in effect, privatize the atmosphere by creating a new form of property rights over natural resources. Carbon markets are predicated less on reducing emissions than on the desire to make carbon cuts as cheap as possible for large corporations.

Another false solution is the move to turn water into private property, which can then be hoarded, bought and sold on the open market. The latest proposals are for a water pollution market, similar to carbon markets, where companies and countries will buy and sell the right to pollute water. With this kind of privatization comes a loss of public oversight to manage and protect watersheds. Commodifying water renders an earth-centred vision for watersheds and ecosystems unattainable.

Then there is PES, or Payment for Ecological Services, which puts a price tag on ecological goods – clean air, water, soil etc, – and the services such as water purification, crop pollination and carbon sequestration that sustain them. A market model of PES is an agreement between the “holder” and the “consumer” of an ecosystem service, turning that service into an environmental property right. Clearly this system privatizes nature, be it a wetland, lake, forest plot or mountain, and sets the stage for private accumulation of nature by those wealthy enough to be able to buy, hoard sell and trade it. Already, northern hemisphere governments and private corporations are studying public/private/partnerships to set up lucrative PES projects in the global South. Says Friends of the Earth International, “Governments need to acknowledge that market-based mechanisms and the commodification of biodiversity have failed both biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation.”

The second problem with our movement is one of silos. For too long environmentalists have toiled in isolation from those communities and groups working for human and social justice and for fundamental change to the system. On one hand are the scientists, scholars, and environmentalists warning of a looming ecological crisis and monitoring the decline of the world’s freshwater stocks, energy sources and biodiversity. On the other are the development experts, anti-poverty advocates, and NGOs working to address the inequitable access to food, water and health care and campaigning for these services, particularly in the global South. The assumption is that these are two different sets of problems, one needing a scientific and ecological solution, the other needing a financial solution based on pulling money from wealthy countries, institutions and organizations to find new resources for the poor.

The clearest example I have is in the area I know best, the freshwater crisis. It is finally becoming clear to even the most intransigent silo separatists that the ecological and human water crises are intricately linked, and that to deal effectively with either means dealing with both. The notion that inequitable access can be dealt with by finding more money to pump more groundwater is based on a misunderstanding that assumes unlimited supply, when in fact humans everywhere are overpumping groundwater supplies. Similarly, the hope that communities will cooperate in the restoration of their water systems when they are desperately poor and have no way of conserving or cleaning the limited sources they use is a cruel fantasy. The ecological health of the planet is intricately tied to the need for a just system of water distribution.

The global water justice movement (of which I have the honour of being deeply involved) is, I believe, successfully incorporating concerns about the growing ecological water crisis with the promotion of just economic, food and trade policies to ensure water for all. We strongly believe that fighting for equitable water in a world running out means taking better care of the water we have, not just finding supposedly endless new sources. Through countless gatherings where we took the time to really hear one another – especially grassroots groups and tribal peoples closest to the struggle – we developed a set of guiding principles and a vision for an alternative future that are universally accepted in our movement and have served us well in times of stress. We are also deeply critical of the trade and development policies of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the World Water Council (whom I call the “Lords of water”), and we openly challenge their model and authority.

Similarly, a fresh and exciting new movement exploded onto the scene in Copenhagen and set all the traditional players on their heads. The climate justice movement whose motto is Change the System, Not the Climate, arrived to challenge not only the stalemate of the government negotiators but the stale state of too cosy alliances between major environmental groups, international institutions and big business – the traditional “players” on the climate scene. Those climate justice warriors went on to gather at another meeting in Cochabamba, Bolivia, producing a powerful alternative declaration to the weak statement that came out of Copenhagen. The new document forged in Bolivia put the world on notice that business as usual is not on the climate agenda.

How the Commons Fits In

I deeply believe it is time for us to extend these powerful new movements, which fuse the analysis and hard work of the environmental community with the vision and commitment of the justice community, into a whole new form of governance that not only challenges the current model of unlimited growth and economic globalization but promotes an alternative that will allow us and the Earth to survive. Quite simply, human-centred governance systems are not working and we need new economic, development, and environmental policies as well as new laws that articulate an entirely different point of view from that which underpins most governance systems today. At the centre of this new paradigm is the need to protect natural ecosystems and to ensure the equitable and just sharing of their bounty. It also means the recovery of an old concept called the Commons.

The Commons is based on the notion that just by being members of the human family, we all have rights to certain common heritages, be they the atmosphere and oceans, freshwater and genetic diversity, or culture, language and wisdom. In most traditional societies, it was assumed that what belonged to one belonged to all. Many indigenous societies to this day cannot conceive of denying a person or a family basic access to food, air, land, water and livelihood. Many modern societies extended the same concept of universal access to the notion of a social Commons, creating education, health care and social security for all members of the community. Since adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, governments are obliged to protect the human rights, cultural diversity and food security of their citizens.

A central characteristic of the Commons is the need for careful collaborative management of shared resources by those who use them and allocation of access based on a set of priorities. A Commons is not a free-for-all. We are not talking about a return to the notion that nature’s capacity to sustain our ways is unlimited and anyone can use whatever they want, however they want, whenever they want. It is rooted rather in a sober and realistic assessment of the true damage that has already been unleashed on the world’s biological heritage as well as the knowledge that our ecosystems must be managed and shared in a way that protects them now and for all time.

Also to be recovered and expanded is the notion of the Public Trust Doctrine, a longstanding legal principle which holds that certain natural resources, particularly air, water and the oceans, are central to our very existence and therefore must be protected for the common good and not allowed to be appropriated for private gain. Under the Public Trust Doctrine, governments exercise their fiduciary responsibilities to sustain the essence of these resources for the long-term use and enjoyment of the entire populace, not just the privileged who can buy inequitable access.

The Public Trust Doctrine was first codified in 529 A.D. by Emperor Justinius who declared: “By the laws of nature, these things are common to all mankind: the air, running water, the sea and consequently the shores of the sea.” U.S. courts have referred to the Public Trust Doctrine as a “high, solemn and perpetual duty” and held that the states hold title to the lands under navigable waters “in trust for the people of the State.” Recently, Vermont used the Public Trust Doctrine to protect its groundwater from rampant exploitation, declaring that no one owns this resource but rather, it belongs to the people of Vermont and future generations. The new law also places a priority for this water in times of shortages: water for daily human use, sustainable food production and ecosystem protection takes precedence over water for industrial and commercial use.

An exciting new network of Canadian, American and First Nations communities around the Great Lakes is determined to have these lakes names a Commons, a public trust and a protected bioregion.

Equitable access to natural resources is another key character of the Commons. These resources are not there for the taking by private interests who can then deny them to anyone without means. The human right to land, food, water, health care and biodiversity are being codified as we speak from nation-state constitutions to the United Nations. Ellen Dorsey and colleagues have recently called for a human rights approach to development, where the most vulnerable and marginalized communities take priority in law and practice. They suggest renaming the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals the Millennium Development Rights and putting the voices of the poor at the centre.

This would require the meaningful involvement of those affected communities, especially Indigenous groups, in designing and implementing development strategies. Community-based governance is another basic tenet of the Commons.

Inspiring Successes Around the Globe

Another crucial tenet of the new paradigm is the need to put the natural world back into the centre of our existence. If we listen, nature will teach us how to live. Again, using the issue I know best, we know exactly what to do to create a secure water future: protection and restoration of watersheds; conservation; source protection; rainwater and storm water harvesting; local, sustainable food production; and meaningful laws to halt pollution. Martin Luther King Jr. said legislation may not change the heart but it will restrain the heartless.

Life and livelihoods have been returned to communities in Rajasthan, India, through a system of rainwater harvesting that has made desertified land bloom and rivers run again thanks to the collective action of villagers. The city of Salisbury South Australia, has become an international wonder for greening desertified land in the wake of historic low flows of the Murray River. It captures every drop of rain that falls from the sky and collects storm and wastewater and funnels it all through a series of wetlands, which clean it, to underground natural aquifers, which store it, until it is needed.

In a “debt for nature” swap, Canada, the U.S. and The Netherlands cancelled the debt owed to them by Colombia in exchange for the money being used for watershed restoration. The most exciting project is the restoration of 16 large wetland areas of the Bogotá River, which is badly contaminated, to pristine condition. Eventually the plan is to clean up the entire river. True to principles of the Commons, the indigenous peoples living on the sites were not removed, but rather, have become caretakers of these protected and sacred places.

The natural world also needs its own legal framework, what South African environmental lawyer Cormac Culllinen calls “wild law.” The quest is a body of law that recognizes the inherent rights of the environment, other species and water itself outside of their usefulness to humans. A wild law is a law to regulate human behaviour in order to protect the integrity of the earth and all species on it. It requires a change in the human relationship with the natural world from one of exploitation to one of democracy with other beings. If we are members of the earth’s community, then our rights must be balanced against those of plants, animals, rivers and ecosystems. In a world governed by wild law, the destructive, human-centred exploitation of the natural world would be unlawful. Humans would be prohibited from deliberately destroying functioning ecosystems or driving other species to extinction.

This kind of legal framework is already being established. The Indian Supreme Court has ruled that protection of natural lakes and ponds is akin to honouring the right to life – the most fundamental right of all according to the Court. Wild law was the inspiration behind an ordinance in Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania that recognized natural ecosystems and natural communities within the borough as “legal persons” for the purposes of stopping the dumping of sewage sludge on wild land. It has been used throughout New England in a series of local ordinances to prevent bottled water companies from setting up shop in the area. Residents of Mount Shasta California have put a wild law ordinance on the November 2010 ballot to prevent cloud seeding and bulk water extraction within city limits.

In 2008, Ecuador’s citizens voted two thirds in support of a new constitution, which says, “Natural communities and ecosystems possess the unalienable right to exist, flourish and evolve within Ecuador. Those rights shall be self-executing, and it shall be the duty and right of all Ecuadorian governments, communities, and individuals to enforce those rights.” Bolivia has recently amended its constitution to enshrine the philosophy of “living well” as a means of expressing concern with the current model of development and signifying affinity with nature and the need for humans to recognize inherent rights of the earth and other living beings. The government of Argentina recently moved to protect its glaciers by banning mining and oil drilling in ice zones. The law sets standards for protecting glaciers and surrounding ecosystems and creates penalties just for harming the country’s fresh water heritage.

The most far-reaching proposal for the protection of nature itself is the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth that was drafted at the April 2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change in Cochabamba, Bolivia and endorsed by the 35,000 participants there. We are writing a book setting out our case for this Declaration to the United Nations and the world. The intent is for it to become a companion document to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Every now and then in history, the human race takes a collective step forward in its evolution. Such a time is upon us now as we begin to understand the urgent need to protect the earth and its ecosystems from which all life comes. The Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth must become a history-altering covenant toward a just and sustainable future for all.

What Can We Do Right Now?

What might this mean for funders and other who share these values? Well, let me be clear: the hard work of those fighting environmental destruction and injustice must continue. I am not suggesting for one moment that his work is not important or that the funding for this work is not needed. I do think however, that there are ways to move the agenda I have outlined here forward if we put our minds to it.

Anything that helps bridge the solitudes and silos is pure gold. Bringing together environmentalists and justice activists to understand one another’s work and perspective is crucial. Both sides have to dream into being – together – the world they know is possible and not settle for small improvements to the one we have. This means working for a whole different economic, trade and development model even while fighting the abuses existing in the current one. Given a choice between funding an environmental organization that basically supports the status quo with minor changes and one that promotes a justice agenda as well, I would argue for the latter.

Support that increases capacity at the base is also very important, as is funding that connects domestic to international struggle, always related even when not apparent. Funding for those projects and groups fighting to abolish or fundamentally change global trade and banking institutions that maintain corporate dominance and promote unlimited and unregulated growth is still essential.

How Clean Water Became a Human Right

We all, as well, have to find ways to thank and protect those groups and governments going out on a limb to promote an agenda for true change. A very good example is President Evo Morales of Bolivia, who brought the climate justice movement together in Cochabamba last April and is leading the campaign at the UN to promote the Rights of Mother Earth.

It was this small, poor, largely indigenous landlocked country, and its former coca-farmer president, that introduced a resolution to recognize the human right to water and sanitation this past June to the UN General Assembly, taking the whole UN community by surprise. The Bolivian UN Ambassador, Pablo Solon, decided he was fed up with the “commissions” and “further studies” and “expert consultations” that have managed to put off the question of the right to water for at least a decade at the UN and that it was time to put an “up or down” question to every country: do you or do you not support the human right to drinking water and sanitation?

A mad scramble ensued as a group of Anglo-Western countries, all promoting to some extent the notion of water as a private commodity, tried to derail the process and put off the vote. The U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand even cooked up a “consensus” resolution that was so bland everyone would likely have handily voted for it at an earlier date. But sitting beside the real thing, it looked like what it was – an attempt, yet again, to put off any meaningful commitment at the UN to the billions suffering from lack of clean water. When that didn’t work, they toiled behind the scenes to weaken the wording of the Bolivian resolution but to no avail. On July 28, 2010, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted to adopt a resolution recognizing the human right to water and sanitation. One hundred and twenty two countries voted for the resolution; 41 abstained; not one had the courage to vote against.

I share this story with you not only because my team and I were deeply involved in the lead up to this historic vote and there for it the day it was presented, but because it was the culmination of work done by a movement operating on the principles I have outlined above.

We took the time to establish the common principles that water is a Commons that belongs to the earth, all species, and the future, and is a fundamental human right not to be appropriated for profit. We advocate for the Public Trust Doctrine in law at every level of government. We set out to build a movement that listens first and most to the poorest among us, especially indigenous and tribal voices. We work with communities and groups in other movements, especially those working on climate justice and trade justice. We understand the need for careful collaborative cooperation to restore the functioning of watersheds and we have come to revere the water that gives life to all things upon the Earth. While we clearly have much left to do, these water warriors inspire me and give me hope. They get me out of bed every morning to fight another day.

I believe I am in a room full of stewards and want, then to leave you with these words from Lord of the Rings. This is Gandalf speaking the night before he faces a terrible force that threatens all living beings. His words are for you.

_“The rule of no realm is mine, but all worthy things that are in peril, as the world now stand, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail in my task if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair, or bear fruit, and flower again in the days to come.

For I too am a steward, did you not know?”_ —J.R.R. Tolkien

Building Blocks for a Commons-based Society

The Commons of the Past

In many times and in many areas, production was organized around a pool of commons—resources that were jointly used and managed by a community of people, according to some community-defined rules. In many societies, water, air, forests and land have traditionally been “in the commons. ” They were managed and used by larger or smaller groups of people, but they could never become private property in the modern sense of the word, with an extensive bundle of exclusive property rights granted to the property owner (cf. [On the Commons 2006]). To give but one example, large parts of European agriculture were organized around a system of open fields during the Middle Ages. Each village had several large unfenced fields that were farmed by the families of the village. Each family was randomly allocated several stripes of fields to farm for their own usage; each family got stripes in different areas and the random allocation process was regularly repeated to avoid families ending up with only god or only bad land. The heavy plows and the oxen pulling them were also often shared by several families; and the livestock of all families grazed on common pasture lands (cf. [Hepburn 2005], [Wikipedia: Open Field System]).

Contrary to the myth spread by Garrett Hardin in his “Tragedy of the Commons” article [Hardin 1968], commons were not “anything goes” areas which anybody could use and abuse at will. Rather, there were community-defined rules stipulating how a commons could be used, protecting it from overuse, privatization and other forms of damage. The eventual demise of commons-based systems was due to a systematic process of “enclosure”: of driving away the villagers from the commons and privatizing the formerly common resources. The commons did not collapse, they were “stolen,” as common sentiment at that time expressed it (cf. [Hepburn 2005], [Wikipedia: Enclosure]).

The Commons of the Present

In many parts of the world, such common resources are still an essential basis of society. Additionally, several new communities which base their practice on the shared goal of creating and preserving a commons have emerged. The free software community has created a commons of hundreds of thousands of software programs that anyone can use, adapt, and pass on to others (in original or adapted form), as long as they comply with the rules defined for free software. These rules mainly serve a twofold goal: they protect the creators of the commons (by restricting/excluding warranty and protecting against misattribution) and they protect the commons themselves (from being privatized). There are two forms of protecting the commons (the created software) against privatization (enclosure): in the weak form, free software is governed by a license which ensures that the software will remain in the commons forever (even if the creator would like to privatize it again), but which doesn't protect derived works created by modifying the original software. The strong form, called copyleft, extends this protection: it postulates that any derived works must be licensed in the same way as the original work (if they are published at all), thus ensuring that all derived 1 Released under creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License The Commoner www.thecommoner.org other articles in commons other articles in common March 2009 works will become part of the commons, too. The weak form of protecting thus ensures, at least, that the commons can never shrink, while the strong form actively encourages its growth.

The free software community, which sprang up in the 1980s, was complemented in the 1990s and early 2000s by a free/open content community setting out to create a commons of content (text, music, movies, and other media). So far, the most impressive outcome of this community has been the Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” whose English edition now contains more that 2 million articles. Just like the free software community, the free content community knows a strong and a weak form of protecting the commons they create, often using the Creative Commons family of licenses to do so. There are many related communities sharing and managing a self-organized commons in a similar fashion. The open access community is turning scientific knowledge back into a commons (as it traditionally had been), by encouraging the free sharing of scientific publications and of the data required for and obtained by scientific experiments. Wireless community networks are self-organized computer networks that provide open access points to the Internet and allow free data transfer to other computers. Community gardens are small pieces of self-managed common land which have emerged in many places around the world, often in urban environments, providing a connection to nature and a sense of
community to the people who cultivate or visit them. And the BookCrossing community is passing books that you no longer need on to others, based on the idea that books are meant to be read, not to sit uselessly in shelves. These are just a few examples of the phenomenon for which Yochai Benkler [2006] has coined the term commons-based peer production (though the last example is more about distribution than about production). Rowe [2008] gives a nice little overview over both the commons of the past and of the present and the ways in which they are connected.

The Commons of the Future

Are these new commons-based communities just a fad, or are they indicators of a serious new trend? Will there, maybe, even be an economic paradigm shift—will future production increasingly take place around a jointly organized and jointly managed commons, rather than around the exchange of private property on the market? I believe that we can indeed expect such a paradigm shift [Siefkes 2007].

If such a future commons-based economy emerges, it will probably resemble the commons of the present more than the commons of the past: it will often use the Internet for global
cooperation and coordination; it will rely on the powers of automation and modern technology to make production easier and more versatile. There won't be oxen pulling plows.

Two traits which the commons of the past and of the present have in common are that commons need communities (without sufficiently strong communities of people willing to create, maintain, and protect them, all commons would or did fall into disarray or become privatized) and that these communities make their own rules to protect and strengthen the commons (the conventions of the open field system and the licenses of free software are examples of such rules). Apparently, these are necessary preconditions for commons to flourish. Any future commons-based society will thus likewise be a community of people making up their own rules for creating, maintaining, and handling the commons. The characteristic trait of such a society will be that production will be based on commons.

If we take this seriously, it means that the resources required for production and the goods that are produced will go into the pool of commons, and that the goods which people consume or use will come out of it. Such a pool of commons won't emerge by itself, it needs a community of people who maintain and support it, as all commons do. Production The Commoner www.thecommoner.org other articles in commons other articles in common March 2009 around a pool of commons thus means that people enter a joint agreement to help each other produce what each of them needs. It becomes their joint responsibility to preserve and protect the common resources of the Earth that make production possible, and to create and maintain a pool of common means of production and goods that is sufficiently large and versatile to provide for everyone's needs and wishes.

The core task of a commons community will therefore be to find out how best to handle this joint responsibility—to find out which rules and agreements work best to ensure that the pool of commons can indeed play its intended role. In my book [Siefkes 2007], I speculate about which specific rules such a community might give itself in order to do so. My point is not to predict the actual rules which such a community will follow. These rules will certainly vary over different areas and different times—the respective communities will find out which rules work for them, as the commons communities of the past and present have done. My point is to show that it is possible to successfully organize the commons-based production of everything, not just of free software and the Wikipedia.

Which general principles might we expect of such an agreement to handle the joint production of everything? While my book describes and motivates details, the following is a very high-level overview of the core ideas: Everyone can give as they like. That's what we already see in free software and related communities: people self-select to do things which they consider important or which they like to do—incidentally, the things which people like to do most often are also the things they do best. Of course, this does not mean that every contribution will be accepted (as it doesn't in free software): just because you fancy that you could be a doctor doesn't mean that people will trust you to operate them.

Taking from the commons means taking something as possession (something that can be used), not as property (something that can be sold and commercialized at will). The difference between possession and property is simple to explain: the apartment which I have rented is in my possession (I'm the one who uses it), but it is the property of my landlord or -lady (she's the one who owns it and has the right to sell it). Commons can often become possession, but never property. For example, fields in the open field system become the temporary possession of the family who got the right to farm them. Likewise, anybody can take free software into their possession (by downloading and using it), but nobody (not even the initial creators) holds full property rights over them (the creators cannot exclusively sell or license the software to a company, since they already donated it to the commons). If goods can become possession, but not property, this also changes the purposes of production. In capitalism, production usually takes place for profit, but profit requires property. Where there is no property, production is therefore driven by other motives: people help to produce something because they want to have it, they self-select themselves to do tasks which they enjoy doing, or they support production in order to give something back to the community. There are ample reasons why production takes place even where there is no profit.

Everyone can take commons into possession, as long as they don't take them away from others. That's what we see from the commons of the present: everybody can freely take software, content, and other kinds of information without having to give anything back, since by taking them you don't take them away from others: everybody else can just make another copy of the software and use it, too. This works for everything that can be copied at practically zero cost. If taking would mean taking away, the best way of solving this problem is to produce enough to satisfy everybody's wishes. If things cannot be copied freely, taking needs social agreements. Say there is only one bicycle left in the commons, but there are The Commoner www.thecommoner.org other articles in commons other articles in common March 2009 two people who would like to take it. Neither of them can just take it at will, since doing so would take it away from the other person (she would deny the other one the possibility of taking it). Since things such as bicycles are produced, this is not necessarily a problem: it might be possible to produce enough of a good (two bicycles, in this case) in order to satisfy everyone's wishes. Doing so is an organizational challenge for the commons community: it has to arrange production so as to ensure that there are enough goods for those who want them, thus avoiding that taking becomes taking away.

Let's have a look at what this can mean in practice. Organizing production requires effort (time which people spent to actually produce the bicycles and other goods needed), and the community must therefore find a way to distribute this effort. It is possible that effort will distribute itself more or less spontaneously, if everybody self-selects themselves for the tasks they like do and does as much of them as they deem appropriate. If and when this isn't sufficient to distribute all effort, more explicit agreements will be necessary, say by coupling giving to and taking from the commons. In my book I mainly discuss two ways of doing so: either distributing effort evenly among participants (flatrate model: everyone contributes about the same amount of effort, regardless of how much they take) or else distributing it roughly proportionally to the effort required to satisfy everyone's wishes ( “the more you want, the more you have to give”). Some further details and possible
modifications follow automatically from the logic of commons-based production (for example that those who cannot contribute effort won't have to, since the goal of effort sharing is to ensure that enough is produced to satisfy people's wishes, not to exclude anybody). There may be other ways to share effort depending on the character of the resources at stake and the respective communities.

When effort is distributed, there will probably be a few tasks that nobody (or not enough people) wants to do, say because they are annoying, dirty, dangerous, or just plain boring. The commons community will have to find a way to distribute such tasks as well. One way of doing so is to “weight them higher,” i.e. to count short times of doing such a task as equivalent to longer times of doing other tasks. If I have to decide whether I would rather spent twenty hours writing software or else five hours removing garbage I might feel more inclined to choose the latter task, even if I
consider it less pleasant.

The second best way is to distribute limited goods in a fair manner. If it's not possible to produce enough of a good to satisfy all demands, the commons community will need ways of deciding who takes precedence. In my book, I discuss auctioning as a possible way to do so: those who are ready to contribute most effort in order to get the limited good will get it. By doing so, they will not only get the good they like to have, but they will also alleviate the task of co-producing the commons for everyone else: since the overall effort required for production stays the same, everyone else will have to contribute slightly less. Auctioning can also be used to allocate natural resources that aren't available in sufficient quantity for everyone who wants to use them, while other natural resources would be available for free (but only for using them, not for using them up).

Other solutions to the priority problem are possible, too. A community could, for example, try to satisfy urgent demands first, or it could trust the people involved to figure out among themselves who should take precedence. The commons communities will have to find out which approach works best for them—quite likely they will end up using a combination of several approaches. Cooperation will be organized by area and by interest, and units of cooperation will nest and overlap as appropriate. There will probably be lots of commons-based

The Commoner www.thecommoner.org other articles in commons other articles in common March 2009 communities around the world, each of them organized by and for the people living
in a certain area and managing the commons that occur in that area. These regional communities will cooperate with each other as reasonable to handle activities that can better be organized at a larger scale, and to manage and share common resources that are unevenly distributed. Cooperation in regional communities will be complemented by cooperation in projects setting out to produce some specific good, where each project comprises the people interested in producing this good and willing to cooperate with each other (this generalizes the language use of the free
software community: a “free software project” is the group of people designing, implementing, and testing a specific free software program). Based on the experiences of the past and present, we can assume that each regional community and each project will find the rules and structures that suit them most, and that communities and projects will cooperate and join forces when it makes sense for them to do so.

Production will take place in projects of people who work together on an equal footing (as peers). When Benkler talks about “commons-based peer production,” he means that there are no command structures in the projects he describes—nobody can order others to do something, and nobody is forced to obey others. This does not mean that there are no structures—on the contrary, there are often maintainers who steer the course of a project and decide, for example, which contributions to accept and which to refuse. But while maintainers can prohibit participants to do things that they consider harmful to the project (throwing them out if they don't comply), they can never order anybody to do anything they do not want to do—all they can do is try to convince people that doing something makes sense. Moreover, nobody is forced to accept the existing structures as they are. If participants of a project are unhappy about some aspects of the project they can try to convince the others to change them. If that fails, they can still fork the project: they can break away from the others and do their own thing.

Commons-based societies worked successfully for centuries, until they were destroyed by the enclosure process accompanying the advent of capitalism—a process which is still going on in parts of the world. At the same time, capitalism has also produced the modern technologies which have made a new generation of commons possible. The renaissance of the commons is in full swing, and there is no reason why it should loose its momentum any time soon. A future commons-based society—commonism, as Nick Dyer-Witheford [2007] proposes to call it—might still be a few generations away, but the tendency is clear.

References

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks. Yale University Press, New Haven,
Connecticut, 2006. URL: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick. Commonism. Turbulence, no. 1, 2007. URL:
http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-1/commonism/.

Hardin, Garrett. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, vol. 162, no. 3859, pp. 1243-
1248, 1968. URL: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/162/3859/1243.

Hepburn, John. Reclaiming commons—old and new. Presentation to the “Other World's
Conference,” 2005.
http://www.mercury.org.au/PDFs/Reclaiming%20Commons%20-
%20John%20Hepburn.pdf

On the Commons Fellows. State of the Commons. 2006. URL:
http://onthecommons.org/content.php?id=1548.
The Commoner www.thecommoner.org other articles in commons

by Jose Ramos, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Abstract: 

This article asks questions about the futures of power in the network era. Two critical emerging

issues are at work with uncertain outcomes. The first is the emergence of the collaborative economy,

while the second is the emergence of surveillance capabilities from both civic, state and commercial

sources. While both of these emerging issues are expected by many to play an important role in

the future development of our societies, it is still unclear whose values and whose purposes will be

furthered. This article argues that the futures of these emerging issues depend on contests for power.

As such, four scenarios are developed for the futures of power in the network era using the double

variable scenario approach.

Introduction

This article examines the futures of power in the network era from the vantage point of

two critical uncertainties: the contest of power in the political and economic domains. As

we move deeper into a cybernetic civilization, where the distance and indeed the distinction

between internet technologies and the people that use them begin to blur,1 new potentials and

predicaments emerge.

The key interest in this article is the empowerment of people in the face of significant

issues, dangers and opportunities related to both capital and state power. The aim

of this paper is therefore to interrogate the power dynamics across these two axes,

political and economic, and to postulate alternative futures that can inform wiser

strategies, policies and choices in the present that lead to better futures.

Methodology: two contests for power.

This article positions critical social changes in economy and politics as major

contest for power typified by uncertainty and indeterminacy.

On the political front is the increasing capability and indeed practice of

widespread surveillance by governments of their populaces for the purpose of social

control, if not outright repression. Reciprocally, citizen groups are increasingly using

network forms of activism to break through the veil of government secrecy, with the

espoused aim of creating transparency and accountability. Thus we might imagine

a worst-case scenario in which government apparatuses with totalitarian designs

win the struggle to control communications in the network age, creating a world of

mass surveillance, social control and terror, reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984,

and resurrecting the horrors of Stalinism, but with much greater sophistication. Or

we may see dynamic citizen movements to create open governments which are

transparent and accountable (Greenberg, 2012).

On the economic front, we see the emergence of what Bauwens et al (2012) refer

to as ‘netarchical capitalism’, where great network conglomerates of the early 21st

century jostle for power, and in the process absorb, stifle or co-opt smaller network

enterprises. Reciprocally, an emerging peer-to-peer (p2p) economy may be outside

of anyone’s capacity to control, as a variety of p2p enterprises and industries emerge

that are both highly localized but embedded in a global open source service system,

displacing the existing corporate mode of service. This implies a struggle between

netarchical capitalism and community based p2p enterprises, where big network

conglomerates oligopolize, subsume or criminalize localized p2p alternatives, or

where we see a flourishing of p2p enterprises and industry which fundamentally

displaces netarchical and/or vectoralist capital.2

While the emergence of the network form is the foundational dynamic within

which associated emerging issues owe their source to, neither can the network form

be rendered in historicist terms as “outside” of human influence (Goldthorpe, 1971).

Indeed the futures of power in the network era rests upon the decisions, actions and

commitments that people make today. Thus in constructing four scenarios through

the double variable method (Inayatullah, 2008), what is posited are not simply

uncertainties related to emerging issues, but more fundamentally who wins major

struggles for power in the network era? The approach to developing scenarios here

is focused on highlighting the institutional patterns within each distinctive scenario.

Institutions can be seen as a meso or a mediating level in the circulation of

power, between the micro dimension of the individual and his or her subjectivity,

and the macro level of political economy (Boulet, 1985). Each scenario in effect

carries a distinctive political economy depending on the winners and losers in each

axis of uncertainty. What this political economy looks like is interrogated by asking

how key institutional structures or functions change in the areas of: education and

research, health care, law, policing and emergency services, agricultural production,

primary and secondary industries, media, government, transport, energy, and other

institutions.

Within each scenario’s distinctive system of power emerges the overall

system purpose and identity characterized by its political economy; and within

each scenario’s distinctive system are nested an array of subjectivities – people

either conscious of unconscious of the systems they are embedded in. Soft power

must circulate in each scenario in a way that legitimates the winners, and delegitimizes

the losers. Or in other terms the political economy within each scenario

is accompanied by a distinct form of cultural hegemony.

Scenario development method

Within each of the two contests for power, network politics and network

economics, two critical uncertainties emerge, represented by two axes.

Figure 1. Four futures of power in a network era

With respect to the economic axis (horizontal in diagram 1 above) the question

that emerges is whether the network economy devolves toward p2p producing

communities, or whether this network economy is incorporated into large-scale

centralized corporations (netarchical capital). If network economic power shifts

toward a meshwork of networked communities and individuals (both local and

trans-local), we can call this a citizen driven p2p economy. If network economic

power is ensconced into large networked multinational corporations, we can call

this netarchical capitalism. In this polarity, major corporations, like Google and

Facebook, co-opt the potentials of the emerging p2p and sharing economies,

and provide the infrastructure and networks for sharing and exchange, though

suppressing and squashing its diversity and autonomy, while extracting surplus value

from such platforms

With respect to the political axis (vertical in diagram 1 above) the question that

arises with the emergence of network politics is whether surveillance technologies,

soft power and network control tilt in the favor of government, or alternatively tilt

in the favor of citizens. If existing forces for surveillance and social control have

their way, governments will increasingly collect large amounts of data on the lives

of the average citizen. When a person becomes of interest to the state they can be

surveilled and monitored, and effectively tamed. This condition would be one in

which citizens lose their capacity for privacy, while government is increasingly

shrouded in secrecy. If citizen movements for transparency and accountability have

their way, then the inner workings of government are pried open for all to see,

government transparency becomes the norm, and the citizenry tame government.

Importantly, in this polarity, individuals retain certain rights to privacy.

The scenarios in this paper are written generically, to allow for their application

across geographies. As an author, however, my own worldview, fears, hopes and

concerns are imprinted throughout the text. I grew up in California, where I spent

the first half of my life, and I therefore use the United States as an imaginative

and contextual backdrop. And thus the ‘uncertainties’ are uncertain by virtue of

geography. In other geographies they may be more certain or even less certain.

Particular countries may already be examples of one of the four scenarios, and I

have therefore added some examples (by way of speculation) in Appendix A.

Secondly, my notion of privacy is shaped by both historical and geographic

contexts. As a non-digital native I have a naturalized attachment to privacy as a

good, and am somewhat uncomfortable posting mundane aspects of my life online.

This is also influenced by the strong and foundational views in the US with regard

to constitutional rights to privacy. Residents of other countries, (e.g. Singapore) or

those from younger generations who post much of their lives on Facebook, may not

consider privacy an issue at all. Categories of analysis and problematization thus

arise from context and embodied disposition.

Emergence of the Network Form

The emerging network society creates new forms of network-based

organizations, not possible in a pre-network world. As Castells (1996) argued,

network organizations may have a ‘telos’, values and ideological direction. As such

‘networks’ are not only value free systems of pragmatic exchange (e.g. eBay), but

as well normatively constituted. In similar fashion, Kellener (2005) coined the term

‘techo-politics’ to express the emerging political nature of network actors. Earlier,

Arguilla and Rondfeldt (1999) used the term ‘noo-politik’ to describe a new type of

power dynamic in the age of networks . ‘Noo’ is drawn from the idea of a noosphere,

the domain of a global conversation, or more hyperbolically ‘global consciousness’,

thus implying a political struggle for popular global consciousness.

While networks are normatively charged inter-spaces, pre-network forms

(e.g. Tribes, Institutions, Markets) are persistent structural features of human

organization. As such, they too will partake in the network form, but very much on

their own terms (Ronfeldt, 1996). Tribal forms use the network form to strengthen

traditional identities in the face of globalized hybridity. Institutions use the network

form to maintain their cultural hegemonies of governance and power. Markets

use the network form to de-territorialize and open global market opportunities,

production and consumption. Yet while, as Rondfeldt argues, Tribes, Institutions,

and Markets will use the network form to their advantage, the network form is also

fundamentally disruptive in respect these previous forms.

A counter movement associated with network actors can therefore also be

discerned. First, rather than simply strengthening existing tribal identities, p2p

potentialities create new transnational tribal identities, satisfying critical existential

needs of affiliation, but in conditions of globalized hybridity. Secondly, rather

than simply strengthening the legitimacy of institutional forms, action networks

reconfigure institutional legitimacy toward openness, transparency and public

conversation. Thirdly, rather than simply strengthening market actors via transterritorial

opportunities and investment, p2p enterprises may displace or make

obsolete some market actors, in particular those extracting value through the

imposition of artificial immaterial scarcities.

One supposition here is thus: in the early development of the network era,

persistent human structures (Tribes, Institutions, Markets) will co-opt network

potentials and win out. Examples include Al-Qaeda’s early successes, China’s

lockdown of political organization on the internet, Nike’s global factory. As

the network era matures, incumbents fight ever more pitched battles, protecting

pharmaceutical’s IP, buying out and destroying rival social networking platforms,

jailing cyber activists. Early modes of co-optation are ‘vectoralist’ in nature, as

the corporate-state power structure imposes the idea of property and control on

immaterial intellectual resources (processes, designs, genetics, pharmaceuticals, art,

etc.), which are in themselves not scarce, but extensively reproducible (Wark, 2004).

This creates a division between the owners (vectoralists) and producers (hackers)

in a class hierarchy based on artificially created scarcities. More recent modes of

co-optation, following Bauwens’ argument, see a shift from vectoralist capital to

what he terms ‘netarchical capital’, what amounts to deriving surplus value from

participatory platforms - via the commodification of everyday relationships. As he

writes:

Netarchical capitalism is a hypothesis about the emergence of a

new segment of the capitalist class (the owners of financial or other

capital), which is no longer dependent on the ownership of intellectual

property rights (hypothesis of cognitive capitalism), nor on the control

of the media vectors (hypothesis of MacKenzie Wark in his book The

Hacker’s Manifesto), but rather on the development and control of

participatory platforms.3

Yet as the network era continues to evolve, developments empower civil

society as the realm capable of mobilizing network potentials with greatest

efficacy. Identities take a post-institutional turn. Political institutions are tamed by

‘sousveillance’ (the broad social network surveils the organization) from citizen

networks; production and exchange of everyday needs shifts toward p2p enterprises.

To rephrase Marx, the question now becomes, in our futures, who controls the means

of relationality?

To more deeply understand transformations in the network era, some context

via political economy is developed. Two major crises are at the heart of shifts in the

network era, a crisis of capitalism and the state.

Table 1: Three contradiction of capitalism and the state Capitalism State

The Crisis of Capitalism

The three contradiction within capitalism include 1) ecological externalities,

2) wealth and power stratification and 3) cosmo-localization. The first two

contradictions are drawn from neo-Marxist theory, (Galtung, 1971; Wallerstein

1983, 2002; Robinson 2004; Sklair, 2005). The third draws from Peer to Peer theory

through Bauwens et al (2012) and cosmo-localization via Ramos (2010).

The first contradiction is of an ecological nature. Capital accumulation through

various stages of the capitalist historical process has been partly based on the

capacity to externalize ecological costs. As ecological problems deepen, there are

both louder and stronger calls and demands to internalize ecological cost and to

apply ecological governance to capital enterprises. Likewise, as ‘nature’ as a source

of endless bounty becomes less and less a reality, and resources become more scare,

extraction shifts focus from extraction from ‘nature’ to extraction from industrial

(close loop) metabolisms. This works in tandem with the re-internalization of

ecological costs.

The second contradiction is of a social nature. In a neo-liberal world that

privileges highly mobile capital investors or venture capitalist, a transnational

capitalist class (TCC) is able to influence political processes, where the end

result is increasing social stratification between the policy empowered and policy

disempowered, hence between the have’s and have-nots. In classic Marxist terms

this can be considered part of the crisis of oversupply, a deflationary processes,

accompanied by a superstructure that legitimizes capitalist led policy. In both cases

stratification as a phenomenon owes its existence to a plutocratic (government by

the wealthy) policy process.

The third contradiction draws from the work of Bauwens et al (2012),

who argues we are shifting from a world typified by material abundance and

immaterial scarcity; to a world increasingly typified by material scarcities yet

immaterial abundance. The advent of a global digital knowledge commons and p2p

infrastructure has a profound and destabilizing effect on typical forms of capital

enterprise. A process that can be termed ‘cosmo-localization’ arises, where emerging

localized enterprises draw on freely available global digital resources, and can peer

finance and produce goods (Ramos, 2010). This subverts the established industrial

capital means by which citizens and communities satisfy their needs, allowing

them to sidestep reliance on large-scale capital enterprises in favor of local Maker

communities and enterprises.

Implications for network economics

From these contradictions we can look at key locales of struggle or tension

between the values in capitalist vs. p2p enterprises. For example, a typical struggle is

between vectoralist (film and music co.) attempts to criminalize file / torrent sharing,

while on the opposing extreme Pirate Party advocacy for a world of non-proprietary

digital content. 4 More moderate but significant are advocates like Lessig (2002) for

Creative Commons and the creation of mashable / remixable digital content. While

Wikipedia crowdsources content from the public under a general public license,

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is at the razors edge of neoliberal outsourcing, with

over 100,000 workers in over 100 countries doing basic intelligence tasks. This

stark difference reflects the very diverse and contrary nature of crowdsourcing

generally. Peer banking is emerging as an alternative to traditional institutional

banking.5 In small scale manufacturing prosumer 3D printing is significant, where a

printer costs approx. US $2000.00 and allows a user to draw from a global pool of

open source / shareable designs to make tens of thousands of things.6 Sharing and

peer procurement systems / services allow for ride sharing, house / room sharing,

tool sharing, etc, with the potential to disrupt incumbent businesses (such as taxi

companies and hotels).7

One critical argument made by advocates for sharing / p2p economies is that

the first two contradictions discussed (ecological and social) provide a mandate

for the third (cosmo-localization). Within conditions of ecological crisis, resource

costs increase, which then necessitates a more intelligent use of existing resources

drawing on a wealth of models, and via network enabled sharing platforms and peer

communities. Conditions of social crisis are typified by what Mike Douglass terms a

‘new normal’, described as:

“repeated economic crisis that result in chronically high levels of

unemployment, precarious employment, no long-term careers, no home

ownership, no pensions, and declining welfare for the majority of

people on the planet.”8

Because people must increasingly create social life outside of ‘typical’ economic

support systems, cosmo-localization empowers local actors / peer producers

with global knowledge resources and network enterprise capabilities, be this in

manufacturing, art, or science, etc. Cosmo-localization allows for a more efficient

use of resources and empowers creativity in discrete locales. But this is at odds with

the dominant industrial-innovation systems wedded to existing intellectual property

regimes. One example of cosmo-localization is the Handmakers Factory, which

has developed a pool of globally crowd sourced designs in clothing, that facilitate

people’s capacity to physically produce them in their locales.9

Fundamentally different principles, held by different groups, are at work in

creating the futures of the network economy. The open source and digital commons

movement aim to create global knowledge commons that allow for free localized

instantiation of value, with open and common use. Relationships, networks and

interaction are seen as sources of shared enrichment and value, not commodifiable.

Large scale platforms, operated through netarchical capital, see human relationships

and interactions as sources of economic rent. Netarchical enterprises provide

stability and integration across multiple platforms, but see user interactions as

commodifiable and exploitable. They seek to either buy out or destroy alternative

platforms – incorporating any useful elements into the existing system of shareholder

driven investment and interest, driven by the logic of accumulation within the global

political economy of capitalism.

The Crisis of the State

The crisis of the State also includes 3 major contradictions: 1) ultimate

authority, 2) legitimate governance and 3) the management of the commons. The

first two contradictions are well established in cosmopolitan theory (Falk, 2004;

Chandler and Baker, 2005; Keane, 2005; Kriegman, Amalric, and Wood, 2006)

while the third relates to a resurgent area of research pioneered by the Commons

Strategy Group (Bollier and Helfrich 2012).

The first contradiction concerns ultimate authority. Over the last century the

nation state has assigned to itself the status of ultimate authority. Today the nation

state is in crisis in part because it neither has the capacity to address many global

/ interstate challenges, but importantly its design often prevents it from acting

outside of national interests. Meanwhile, a variety of citizens group, some local and

others transnational have assumed moral stances that are transnational / global in

character. This process is seeing the transfer of ultimate authority from the state to

transnational citizen groups.

Historically, the development of the state after the treatise of Westphalia saw the

gradual erosion of all competing forms of ultimate authority, (the church or other

groups). Empires had accommodated overlapping systems of authority, in particular

the ultimate moral authority of religious elites. Through the 19th and 20th centuries, as

the state developed, alternative or competing systems of ultimate cultural authority

were sidelined or dissolved. Nationalism as ideology represented a marriage of

cultural authority / allegiance with the states instrumental power. Today we inherit a

system where the state assumes itself as the ultimate moral authority along side its

status as the primary holder of instrumental political power.

This emerging contradiction concerns how transnational civic organizations

challenge and attempt to displace the state as the ultimate moral authority, as these

citizens take a planetary view inclusive of many or all nations, e.g. in the area

of climate mitigation, human rights, transparency, etc. To be clear, however, the

challenge to state authority is not a general challenge to its authority - the majority

of its law making process. The general authority of states is vast. This change merely

displaces the state as the ultimate authority, a status it had accrued over the past

century. The key gap then is between the transnational citizen organizations’ status

as new ultimate moral authorities and their lack of instrumental capacities to enact

change. While the state increasingly loses its status as ultimate authority, it retains

vast instrumental political capabilities.

The second contradiction concerns the crisis in the democratic process or

legitimate governance. Notwithstanding the increasingly plutocratic mode of

policy making in the West through neo-liberalization (USA + Eurozone), access

to information, the capacity for citizen group to engage with the complexities of

the policy making process, renders existing systems of democratic representations

antiquated (Dator, 2007). Increasing citizen engagement and desire for devolved

localized governance or direct / participatory democracy runs counter to the

increasing closure of the political process.

The third contradiction relates to the State’s limitations in the governance and

management of shared Commons. The State’s role in protecting ecological commons

(oceans, rivers, beaches, ground water, etc.) and building social commons (roads,

services, libraries, etc.) is perpetually constrained by virtue of the need to satisfy

powerful State-producing interests (industries, investors, military, voters, media,

etc.). The outcome of this power brokering process creates winners and losers, as the

State ‘closes ranks’ with these interests, rather than producing policy geared toward

common interests. This is especially acute today, where transnational capital dictates

much national policy, whose investors are abstracted from those concretely affected

by such policies (as per the second contradiction of capitalism). Communities are

forced to develop parallel systems of governance outside the state system which can

achieve adequate levels of social and intergenerational enfranchisement (Bollier and

Helfrich, 2012).

Implications for network politics

Networked civil society organizations have become confident political actors

with ultimate moral authority on their side. Despite limitations in instrumental

power, they express a new socio-political reality, what Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1999)

articulated as ‘noo-politik’:10

Noopolitik is an approach to statecraft, to be undertaken as much

by nonstate as by state actors, that emphasizes the role of soft power

in expressing ideas, values, norms, and ethics through all manner of

media. This makes it distinct from Realpolitik, which stresses the hard,

material dimensions of power and treats states as the determinants of

world order. (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 1999, p29)

In the case of Wikileaks, for example, ‘they’ (a plural network of actors) do not

consider the state an ultimate authority, but rather their own cause to expose state

secrets as a superior moral position. To instrumentalize their cause members engage

in new ‘techno-political’ strategies (Kellner, 2005), and yet their leader remains

holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy for fear of being extradited to a US grand jury

and being tried in a kangaroo court. The gap between instrumental power and soft

power is stark. The US’ attack on Wikileaks is a response in the context of soft

power – as soft power works by strengthening or weakening the legitimacy of actors,

whether they be economic, state, or non-state. As Arquilla and Rondfeldt presciently

argued, where Realpolitik is used to repress the noetic sphere of information and

culture, it amounts to a failure in information strategy (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 1999,

p.41)

In networked environments where populations with smart phones have extensive

sensing (sound, video, air composition, radio activity, etc.) capabilities, citizens can

surveil each other as well as police and businesses, police can surveil government

and citizens, government can surveil citizens, commerce etc. The video recording

of the Rodney King beating, which led to the Los Angeles riots, provided an early

example of these new potentials. The widespread diffusion of mobile computing

makes the possibility of ubiquitous ambient sensing common place (via visual,

audio, text, etc), as seen in the recent uprising in 2007 in Burma, 2008 in Iran, the

recent Arab Spring and Occupy movements. The shift toward mobile and ubiquitous

networking will increasingly extend the capacity for people to document and

transmit an environment.

The internet pioneer, Josh Harris, a dot-com entrepreneur who founded Jupiter

Research and Pseudo.com, pioneered extreme experiments in the eradication of

privacy, was behind the bizarre avant guarde project “Quiet: We Live in Public”,

predating the show “Big Brother.”11 Of course the idea was well developed in

George Orwell’s 1984, and it could be argued this practice has existed for as

long as repressive political regimes have found ways to spy on their populace in

comprehensive ways. One recent example includes Nokia’s assistance to Iran’s

regime in tracking political dissidents.12

Netarchical conglomerates, such as Google and Facebook, have added a new

dimension to this, as part of the movement toward Big Data. Passive data collection

has become an internet era norm in a new service model in which data mining

algorithms learn to know us better than we know ourselves. Drawing on this

trend, US defense firm Raytheon has developed predictive software called Rapid

Information Overlay Technology (RIOT) aimed at neutralizing ‘security threats’

based on such public data.13 RIOT follows the development of other systems such as

Palantir.14 Since the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the US, and ambiguous legal language

in the Patriot Act opened the door to government surveillance of citizens, security

agencies such as the NSA have revived large-scale communications surveillance.

Despite the defeat and discarding of the controversial Total Information Awareness

(TIA) program, the NSA has continued to develop surveillance infrastructure

through programs like TrapWire, which provides all encompassing surveillance

capabilities, now well established through US communications infrastructure.15

Segments of civil society, businesses and governments are engaged in both

reactive and proactive activities to guard and extend their powers within the new

field of network politics. The vanguard for techno-political global civil society,

WikiLeaks, is just the first in a series of social innovations that will attempt to

break through the veil of government and corporate secrecy (Greenberg, 2012).

Reciprocally, governments have already (China) or are in the process (USA) of

developing large-scale comprehensive surveillance systems designed for ensuring

social control and neutralize dissent.16 Meanwhile, the network conglomerates

already have the most comprehensive platforms for peering into the world of people,

aided by the very same consumers that use them.

The Four Scenarios

Scenario 1: Caged Chickens

[Formula: Gov. and business collude / citizens dis-empowered]

The Occupy movement of 2011 could only be squashed through coordinated

paramilitary force. Elites in the United States quickly understood that they were on

the precipice of losing power, and began to reformulate a more aggressive strategy

for power maintenance. Systems developed for counter terrorism, such as TrapWire

and Echelon, began to be focused on citizen activists. Bloated government security

agencies had ample resources to infiltrate and identify dissidents and agitators, be

they 17-year-old anarchists or 70-year-old libertarians. New laws were put into place

that blurred the line between foreign-born terrorist activity and political radicalism.17

A series of terrorist attacks, attributed to political radicals, but which many

suspected were planted, galvanizes the United States. Adbusters and Democracy

Now! are designated terrorist-affiliated organizations and shut down, along

with hundreds of other politically active organizations. As in the aftermath of

9/11, thousands of suspected terrorists are rounded up and rendered offshore for

detainment, interrogation and processing. The state apparatus uses systems like

Palantir to easily anticipate civic protests and neutralize protest leaders.18

In the aftermath of a weakened and cowed civil society, the further maintenance

of power using soft means becomes easier. Ambiguous legislation is used to silence

institutional dissent. Media companies can lose their licenses when television and

online news reporters say the wrong things. Self-censorship becomes the order of the

day. The pervasiveness and power of the corporate-state surveillance system allows

the government to neutralize dissent in its most nascent forms. An email to a friend

expressing dissatisfaction, a random joke about the government, or association with

the wrong person at the wrong time. A culture of fear begins to seep into everyday

life. Many ask will I be next, or when will they come for me?

The 21st-century corporate-state becomes stronger. The circulation of power

from government to business and vice versa interlocks. The massive influence

of corporate money to government is not only normalized, but a cottage political

science industry (funded by industry but convenient for government puppets)

emerges that constructs the corporate-state as a “natural state of affairs” in the

evolution of society. It is argued the corporate-state offers people great efficiency,

safety and security, and identity.

While the stratification of wealth was an issue at the turn of the century, the

second order consequences of hyper-stratification could never have been imagined.

But by the first quarter of the 21st century strong patterns emerge. The elite now get

global educations, traveling widely and gaining crucial worldly experience, while

the vast majority are locally trained in a technical capacity - liberal and reflective

learning is prohibited left wing propaganda. New medicine can prolong the life of

elites into their 120s and 130s, but the vast majority live till their 60s, succumbing to

a variety of industrial illnesses connected to the biological environments they ingest

or live in. The wealthy live in safe enclaves, the rest must deal with substandard

security and policing. Most law making reflects a struggle between powerful

interests, wealthy families and corporations mobilizing large sums of money to

mount sophisticated legal battles that dwarf the common wage. Increasingly the

‘inner commons’ or ‘mental commons’, ones mind, attention, time, is enclosed

and commodified. To gain momentary satisfactions, people are encouraged to sell

‘personal futures’ (future labor and loyalty) as a commodity. One can ‘leverage’ their

future mind or body. The age of network endenturement arrives.

Netarchical conglomerates enable people to connect, but all networking is

through sanctioned channels. Citizens are monitored, and all nongovernment

organizations are registered and tightly regulated. Those people which offer

countervailing wisdom are silenced, often through a series of “bad luck” incidents,

the loss of a job, inability to find a new job, or if that does not work through more

severe intimidation. People disappear and rendition, torture and terror exist behind a

veil of silence.

Research and technology development is geared toward making production

and consumption more efficient across the system. Networks allow allocation

optimization. The state has an interest in middle aged healthy citizens who produce

for the industrial state and who make loyal workers, but not much interest in older

people, or those that do not fit into this system. You have become a caged chicken.

Don’t stop laying eggs, or you end up in the pot.

Scenario 2: Peer to Peer Patriots

[Formula: Gov. and citizens collude / big business disempowered]

Under pressure from international competition, rising energy prices, traditional

primary and secondary (resources and manufacturing) sectors go into major decline.

The anticipated post-recession recovery from the great financial crisis of 2008 never

materialized. Instead, recession led to a “new normal” of out of work but active

class of “creatives”. In the early 2010s new sharing startups begin to emerge that

allowed people to peer procure basic services like transport, health services, and

entertainment. But as the crisis of the new normal deepened, with more straight out

of college jobless, more intensive “post-industrial” enterprises emerged to satisfy the

basic needs of people.

The mix of creative classes, from artists, graphic designers, architects,

entrepreneurs, and others, with time on their hands and needs to meet, begin building

a new economy based on peer systems of production. Grow-your-own solidarity

farms, micro-manufacturing based on open-source design pools, cradle to cradle

collectives, 3D / additive manufacturing for highly engineered products, and other

peer enterprises begin to take hold as new forms of economic activity.

At first these new peer based industries offer basic livelihoods for those who

cannot get a “regular” job in the new normal. But as these enterprises grow in

strength and popularity, they begin displacing traditional industrial forms. Wikispeed

was only the first of hundreds of “design your own car” enterprises that churned

out high-efficiency and low-cost modular automobiles. Traditional automotive

companies attempted to enforce legal monopolies to support their traditional scale

based manufacturing, but provincial and state-based citizen campaigns targeting

and attacking politicians with close industry ties force legislatures to open a wide

variety of activities to peer production communities. Soon these communities are

legally enfranchised and competitively displacing older economies of scale based

production and services.

“traditional American industrial corporations come up against a

situation in which cheapening, distributed means of production means

no profitable outlet for all the investment capital sitting around.

“Capitalism is eating itself …. The days of companies with names

like General Electric and General Mills and General Motors are

over.” Desperate Fortune 500 corporations, selling off corporate

jets and other assets at fire sale prices, attempt to buy into garage

micromanufacturing operations as a Hail Mary pass to stave off

irrelevancy and bankruptcy.” Doctorow (2012) in …Kevin Carson

(2012)19

And yet these nascent industries also understand that without political support

with the right legislation, the fledgling revolution could be reversed. Already,

finance capital and netarchical conglomerates attempt to buy out peer production

enterprises. Google and others develop competing sharing and micro-manufacturing

platforms in the hope of cashing-in on the surge. Backroom corporate lobbyists

attempt to convince government regulators that citizen-based enterprises are not

capable of proper regulation. The issue comes to a head when a Christian extremist

group massacres 52 people using weapons produced through homemade 3D printing

devices. A battle ensues between an alliance of Netarchical and industrial capitalists

that wish to enclose or lock out p2p capabilities into rentier platforms, while

hundreds of thousands of peer production and sharing communities come together

into political federations.

Local and state governments know that a return to a pre-p2p economy would

mean increasing joblessness and a weakened economy unable to compete globally.

Yet the radical potential opened by p2p processes is potentially destabilizing. People

are also worried about the shadow of decentralized production and finance (BitCoin

has become the primary platform for money laundering by global mafias).

Governments increasingly take the role of guarantors of security. While they

leave the economic engine in the hands of the p2p pioneers, issues related to

terrorism, the availability of 3D printable weaponry, the increasing threat of nano

weapons, homemade drones, child pornography and other network era pathologies

further push citizenry to accept the state’s much needed role in surveillance and

control. A consensus emerges that all people must be surveilled in order to maintain

security. Yet the ‘surveillor’ must also be surveilled. Institutions exists in a complex

and interlocking system of surveillance. As well, the state’s role evolves toward

increasingly disciplined eco-governance / eco-efficiency, where resources are

strictly monitored for reuse. “Eco-crimes” are punished with severity. Additive

manufacturing cooperatives must abide by strict disposal and re-use laws.20

The collapse of the industrial sector precipitates a weakened Wall Street, with

citizen initiated reform of speculative practices. However, the bigger shift is how

p2p financing displaces Wall Street, as crowd and community funding are the

engines that propel p2p enterprises.

While government is not in the business of primary production of goods and

services, the state plays a key role in regulating emerging p2p industries, such

as peer banking, peer manufacturing, and peer media. Citizens appreciate the

government’s oversight role in these key sectors, and there’s an acceptance of the

intrusive, if not soft authoritarian approach that government now takes. Government,

in partnership with citizen-based ubiquitous monitoring, makes sure that p2p

production adheres to basic standards.

Because government is still the power base for surveillance, instances

of corruption and abuse of surveillance powers exist. However, government

surveillance powers must draw upon citizen based mobile sensing, and thus requires

power sharing. In addition government sits in un-easy tension with respect to the

new economic power of p2p communities. Peer producers, through economic

federations, are able to influence policy outcomes.

The values of the creative class that created the p2p revolution become

more solidly embedded in the legitimacy of government based surveillance and

enforcement. While it started as a counterculture movement in the 60s and 70s,

and transformed into the creative class in the first decades of the 2000s, oddly this

group has morphed into a type of ‘green conservativism’. While socially very liberal

(e.g. pro GLIBTI rights etc.), these people are hardworking savers and community

builders, the Protestants of the 21st century. A new type of wealth emerges from

green practices, eco-efficiency, whole systems design, education and conservation.

This creates a new class dynamic based on the ascendancy of the green conservatives

vs. 20th century ‘unconscious consumers’, previously known as modernists (Ray and

Anderson, 2000).

While many find the intrusiveness and extent of social control within this new

system unbearable: antisocial (e.g. anti-homophobic) and anti-green behavior

is quietly and efficiently removed through the ubiquitous regulation of fellow

networked citizens, the majority are content that the primary needs of security and

economic provision are satisfied, and society has become more eco-friendly.

Scenario 3: Republic of Google

[Formula: Big business and citizens collude / gov. disempowered]

The 192 companies bought by Google from 2002 to 2011 was only the

beginning. As p2p enterprises began to emerge driving a shift towards sharing and

micro-manufacturing, big conglomerates like Google did not fail to notice.

The dynamics and power struggle for control of these new enterprises

was complex. On the one hand, traditional industries, like taxi companies and

supermarkets considered network sharing and peer-based systems enemy # 1: rideshares

and grow-your-own farm solidarity schemes. They lobbied government to

shut them down, arguing they were unregulated forms of enterprise, dangerous and

were not paying taxes. On the other hand, network conglomerates coveted these

emerging enterprises as a source of network rents. Network conglomerates naturally

sympathized with the p2p enterprises, but wanted in on the action.

A pincer movement emerged by which netarchic capital displaced traditional

industries while enclosing and buying out community-based p2p enterprises.

Netarchical pre-eminence in the early 21st century ensured its influence on

government. A series of netarchic-sponsored laws were enacted which provided

tax loopholes for peer based production, while at the same time requiring costly

regulation, insurance and oversight. This had the effect of simultaneously

legitimizing network based service provision which would displace traditional

industries, while making it hard for small p2p community scale enterprises to run.

Unsurprisingly, as netarchy wins the legal battle, companies like Google buyout

or “out-attention” thousands of small-scale p2p enterprises (under threat of duress)

at fire sale prices, or p2p community leaders are co-opted (“you can work with us

or work with no-one, your choice”). Soon services like “Google Manufacture™”,

“Google Grow™” and “Google Share™” are thriving platforms that allow people

to network and peer produce basics, from transport, to food, to health services, and

just about anything else, but require a new class of digital sharecroppers to offer an

ongoing network rent to participate.

A new dynamic begins to emerge in the political landscape. Governments are

increasingly weakened through round after round of fiscal austerity (especially

with netarchic capital offshored) following major financial crises related to the

economics of debt. Governments print money but are ultimately unable to service

financial commitments, and topple like dominoes, as strong states become weak

states, leaving impoverished pensioners whose paper dollars revert to the value of

wallpaper.

Network industries thrive, as the de-territorialized flows of ideas, designs,

services and goods, based on individual talents and productive capabilities,

underpin a dynamic and emerging cosmo-local economy. At first this network

economy faces the challenge of decoupling from state-based currencies which are

volatile and are losing value as states print money with abandon. BitCoin and other

alternative currency enterprises are the first to address the need for this decoupling.

However, with the enclosure of p2p enterprises by netarchical capital, the highvalue

flows in the emerging network economy are captured by platforms developed

by conglomerates. The conglomerates require their own currencies by which they

force users to transact business within the corporate family, that are fully integrated

across the variety of peer-based sharing and micro manufacturing bases. Currencies

are developed by conglomerates, GCoin, FBCoin, based on the BitCoin open-source

protocol, which become credible and tradable on exchanges globally.

The netarchic conglomerates become powerful economic islands that span

across city states and regions. As governments lose their economic capacities, the

big netarchic conglomerate platforms take their place as providers of basic needs

and services. Conglomerate platforms provide the funding for education, driven by

network capabilities and requiring corporate loyalty. Employees can access peerbased

health services, while health service providers are ensconced into rentier

systems.

Netarchic conglomerates, which become transnational network entities that also

connect with localized sharing and micro manufacturing, require the development

of new legal codes and frameworks, and thus expand their jurisdictional and

jurisprudential capabilities in the face of weakened states. Contract law between

conglomerates, or between a company and a peer provider become central.

Protection services are connected with those who are closer to the centers of

corporate power. Research is driven by the Corporation for the Corporation, and

large-scale energy provisioning for the corporation becomes a priority, while those

outside of any number of corporate families experience the harsh realities of longterm

post-peak oil energy decline. Ragged feral nomads live beyond the network

families.

As state finances crumble they lose the capacity to surveil the population. On

the other hand, citizens are ubiquitous in the halls of government. The capacity for

citizens to share and peer into the world of government becomes more extensive,

information which is automatically shared with big netarchic conglomerates,

Google, Facebook, and other powerhouses of the network age. Citizens, ensconced

into a system of perpetual ambient data gathering become the instruments by which

government is undermined. Government loses the weapon of secrecy, which is now

reserved for the rentier class of netarchic capitalists.

Citizen attempts to use government to tilt the balance of power are met

with subtle yet effective marginalization. Successful p2p managers and digital

sharecroppers cannot be political. Businesses have become disproportionately

powerful, and, unlike government, are able to control flows of information much

more effectively than government, and can counter citizen attempts to make business

transparent.

Yet the netarchic conglomerates must remain somewhat accountable. Digital

sharecroppers can jump corporate ship if desperate, people can move physically

and virtually in this globalized world of economic islands and city-states. People’s

‘enfranchisement’ within the Corporation, through stock, reputation systems,

and contracts form the basis for their survival, and is the counterbalance to the

exploitative nature of the rentier systems that privileges the netarchical capitalists.

Scenario 4: Federation of the Commons

[Formula: Citizens divide and subdue market and state]

The 2010s were marked by a pitched struggle between an insurgent citizen

movement and the ruling political and economic elites. Different manifestations

of the movement, in the US, Russia, China, the EU and elsewhere, were correct in

their diagnosis of power, the fundamental challenge to democracy was the influence

of big business on government, and politician’s reliance on corporate monies to

maintain power.

The Occupy movement and Arab spring were only the beginning, as wave

after wave of techno-political activism swept the world. WikiLeaks was the first of

many platforms that began to dismantle the inner workings of government secrecy

(Greenberg, 2012). In response to this, using the pretext of the threat of terrorism,

governments attempted to surveil and detain the most radical agitators. And yet,

the government’s capacity for surveillance increasingly could not be matched by

the sousvalent capacities emerging across civil society. Leaks proving governmentbusiness

collusion continued to hemorrhage out of leaky institutions. Repressive

government tactics, the use of paramilitary force and unlawful detainment, was

quickly made public and condemned. The government-business power complex

began to lose its popular credibility in many countries around the world. Civil

society’s soft power was winning.

This culminated in a globally coordinated campaign to break the power nexus

between many governments and big business. The campaign used general strikes,

protests and sit-ins that aimed at national referendums for constitutional reform. The

reforms would limit the power of corporations to influence government, limit the

power of corporations to produce media to influence the public, and limit the power

of government to use media as a tool for self-promotion and self legitimation.

Throughout this period netarchic capital had been attempting to cash in on the

p2p enterprise and sharing economy. Influencing government to enact laws and

policy that forced sharing and p2p enterprises into costly regulation and insurance,

the network conglomerates attempted to legally lock out public and commons based

enterprises, and offer their own substitutes on their rentier platforms.

Yet throughout this period p2p guilds had become a new economic and political

force. They were able to wage defensive political actions to resist the strategic

enclosure of relationality as orchestrated by netarchic capital interests. The guilds

mobilized the public to choose citizen based platforms.

P2p guilds had expanded into complex trans-local entities that exerted power

locally but coordinated and pooled across national and global scales. They had

become politically fearsome forms that influenced government policy toward

supporting peer production.

When the new constitutional referendums came into play, p2p guilds, no longer

hobbled by the imposition of laws imposing artificial scarcities, restrictions and

monopolies, are able to expand rapidly, replacing, substituting and making obsolete

many of the core functions provided by both netarchic platforms, as well as older

industrial forms that had protected their interests through lobby influence on

government policy.

New sophisticated cosmo-local investment pools drawing from p2p networks

provide the financial mechanism within which long-term investment is funneled

into p2p enterprises. A new financial ecosystem, using new currencies, allow peer

producers to exchange abstract value (currency value) with other peer producers

globally, with greater efficiency and lower cost then with pre-existing currencies.

The result is a new range of circulatory systems across peer producing industries.

Cosmo-localization becomes the new global norm. P2p guilds increasingly

interlock with other peer producing guilds to form complementary ‘social

metabolisms,’ complex organs of peer producers reciprocating dynamic value.

While manufacturing in primary production is localized and customized, through

3D printing and p2p cottage industries, reciprocally, these localized manufacturing

processes draw from an explosion of global commons content in artifice design. The

end of artificial immaterial scarcities, which were maintained through the influence

of incumbent business interests, leads to a productivity boost and a new wave of

wealth creation.

New social formations flourish. Community sourced but globally enriched

education drives transformations in learning. Health becomes multi-spatial across

local barefoot doctors, to national insurance schemes, linking with global commons

oriented expertise. A new commons oriented jurisprudence emerges to articulate new

types of commons based rights and responsibilities. Research and development is

increasingly driven by diverse citizen and stakeholder needs. Micro manufacturing

forms into ‘meta’ manufacturing processes across thousands of producers enabling

large-scale and complex, highly polished products and services. As industry becomes

flexibly scalable, energy production too is decoupled from the grid, developed for

thousands of contextually specific applications, making huge reductions in energy

use. Protection services are citizen directed, peer managed and inclusive.

Conclusion

The four scenarios offer one way to discern power dynamics and strategies in

the evolution of the network era. They can be used to inform how we may begin

strategizing toward our preferred futures. As proposed in the appendix, we may find

that particular nations are in or moving toward one of the four scenarios already. We

may ask, what is the pathway from one scenario position to another?

A more fundamental question, however, is normative: what are our values,

and how does this influence what futures we consider desirable? From the

author’s vantage point, with respect to the value of the fullest expression of human

empowerment, scenario four is clearly the most desirable. In this fourth scenario,

a federation of the commons, citizens and communities are actively engaged in

shaping the fabric of their lives and societies through a process of ‘deep democracy’

(Ramos, 2012). But others may find greater affinity with a different scenario.

Paraphrasing Ashis Nandy (1992), one person’s utopia may be another’s tyranny.

This exercise was merely a starting point. This paper was intended to provoke

conversation, hopefully toward the refinement of our understanding of social forces,

political dynamics and the alternatives we confront. It is neither conclusive nor

all encompassing. There are of course other axes that can be used. There are other

scenario development methods. There are other assumptions that can be employed.

For example, it may be that citizens partner with the state to create new p2p

governance systems, challenging the assumption that one side must win over the

other (Ramos et al, 2011).

The stakes are high, and if we are serious about creating the futures we prefer,

we will need to create high visibility public conversations that catalyze new

intelligent pathways for making our ideals a reality. A central theme and argument of

this paper, following in the footsteps of others (Dator, 2005) is simply that there is

no given future, the future is shaped by our capacity to imagine alternative futures,

visualize and design them, strategize pathways and implement effective actions.

No better example exists than the late Aaron Swartz’s efforts to stop the SOPA

legislation.21 It is true that some people and groups have more power than others,

economically, politically, and culturally – but no person or group has a monopoly on

human aspirations. Visions are by design hard to achieve, but with intelligence and

determination they are realizable.  

Appendix

Speculative overview of position of eight nations within scenarios

Correspondence

Jose M. Ramos

Smart Services CRC

Queensland University of Technology

28 Fontein St.

West Footscray,

Vic. 3012

Email:jose@actionforesight.net

Notes

1 http://services2020.net/node/1331 accessed Jan 2013

2 http://p2pfoundation.net/Netarchical_Capitalism accessed Jan 2013

3 http://p2pfoundation.net/Netarchical_Capitalism accessed Jan 2013

4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party

5 http://uk.zopa.com/

6 http://www.makerbot.com/ and http://www.thingiverse.com/ accessed Jan 2013

7 http://www.shareable.net/blog/former-cabbie-ridesharing-is-the-future

8 From personal communication Oct 2012 documented in: http://theforesightepidemic.

com/2012/11/01/the-future-of-cities-in-the-asia-pacific/

9 http://www.handmakersfactory.com.au/ Accessed April 2013

10 Noo-politik is a contraction of ‘Noos’ (Greek for ‘mind’), and ‘politik’ (a play on

the political discourse of Realpolitik). It signifies a new political reality in which

culture, mediated through ICT, is the critical space of contestation and the mediator

of political power.

11 The TV show Big Brother can be seen to have had a norming effect toward the

acceptance of surveillance structures by the public, with significant changes post

9/11 patriot act.

12 See: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/government/nokia-burned-by-eu-for-assistingiran-

with-monitoring-technology/7080 accessed April 2013

13 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/10/software-tracks-social-mediadefence

Accessed Feb 2013

14 http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/palantir-the-vanguard-of-cyberterrorsecurity-

11222011.html Accessed Feb 2013

15 See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/13/trapwire-surveillance-system...

leak accessed Jan 2013

16 http://snuproject.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/the-internet-is-a-threat-to-h...

julian-assanges-a-call-to-cryptographic-arms-via-p2p-foundation/

accessed Jan 2013

17 http://www.constitutioncampaign.org/blog/?p=11500&utm_

medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews#.UOpRtYV8MXw accessed Jan 2013

18 http://www.palantir.com/ accessed Jan 2013

19 http://c4ss.org/content/13441 accessed Jan 2013

20 http://changeist.com/changeism/2012/10/30/plastic-overdrive accessed Jan 2013

21 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg&feature=youtube_gdata_player

accessed Jan 2013

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Futura, 31, 4.

Ray, P., Anderson, S. (2000). The Cultural Creatives. NY, Harmony Books.

Robinson, W. (2004). A Theory of Global Capitalism. London, John Hopkins Uni

A commons-based society refers to a shift in values and policies away from the market-based system that dominates modern society, especially over the past 30 years. The foundation of the market is narrowly focused on private wealth, while the commons is built upon what we all share—air, water, public spaces, public health, public services, the Internet, cultural endowments and much more.

One of the most compelling ideas being raised today is the possibility of evolving from a market-based society to a commons-based society. The commons has always been an element of human civilization. But its central role in sustaining all societies has recently been rediscovered, inspiring new lines of thinking in fields ranging from high technology to public health to business.

A commons-based society is one that values and protects commons assets, managing them for the benefit of everyone. Market-based solutions would be valuable tools in a commons-based society, as long as they do not undermine the workings of the commons itself.

This is the workspace where we will co-design the curriculum for the social learning course on

Learning Together about and for the Commons

For more details about social learning including past announcements of previously run courses and videos please visit the social learning page here

Sources to draw on for our presentation at the Ijaw People's Association, on 27th August

Articles

Citizen Dividends And Oil Resource Rents A Focus on Alaska, Norway and Nigeria, by Alanna Hartzok

Citizens of Alaska have been receiving individual dividend checks from an oil rent trust fund since 1982. Norway's citizens receive substantial social services and invest oil rents in a permanent fund for the future. Nigeria has yet to establish a similar fund for its oil revenue stream. This paper explores the oil rent institutions of Alaska, Norway and Nigeria with a focus on these questions: Are citizen dividends from oil rent funds currently or potentially a source of substantial basic income?

It has an extensive section on Nigeria, which is an excellent primer on the oil revenue distributiion and a must to read to all of us involved in the collaboration with the Ijaw People's Association

Pictures and videos

Elinor Ostrom on managing "common pool" resources

Elinor Ostrom's briefing session with community leader's in Nigeria (2001-2006)