Commons Economies in Action

* Article / Chapter: Commons Economies in Action. Mutualizing Urban Provisioning Systems. Michel Bauwens, Rok Kranjc, and Jose Ramos

URL = https://www.academia.edu/120039141/Commons_Economies_in_Action

From the book, Sacred Civics [1]

Abstract

1.

"This chapter serves as an accessible introduction to some key concepts that are used to describe contemporary urban commons and commoning and as an overview of situated experiments in public-commons cooperation and governance, that have adapted these through a variety of protocols, institutional designs, and social, technical, and ecological innovations. Drawing on the experiences of the cities of Ghent, Barcelona, and others, as well as recent developments in peer-to-peer production and value accounting, it makes a case for urban contributive democracy, and finally, cosmolocal production, a planetary mutualization strategy."

2.

"We start this chapter by defining two key concepts-the commons and peer-to-peer production-and outlining a vision for a contributive economy based around them. Following the research by Elinor Ostrom, we define "the commons" as a set of shared resources that are maintained, created, or cared for by a situated community or group of stakeholders. While the first part of the definition proposes that commons are something objective, the second adds a subjective element: commons are constituted by human beings, it is a choice a "we" makes as to how they manage a resource (natural or otherwise) and the allocations it can provide. The third stresses self-governance: around the commons, specific rules and norms are created. This clearly distinguishes it from the "dominium" principles of private property, but also from public goods that are managed by an external agent, i.e., the State. Here we should stress that post-anthropocentric discourses question the definition of natural resources in terms of its ontological dualism between nature and culture. The definition of commons can meaningfully be deepened here by borrowing the notion of "web of life" as an extension of the resources, their governance, and the (multi-species) communities involved. A key issue today is to move from the idea of human commons that manage "external" resources, to the idea of commons as an alliance or partnership between human and nonhuman communities and entities as interdependent agents and subjects. Many Indigenous cultures, more conscious of their interdependencies in the web of life, often achieved this through the sacralization of the forces of life and nature, and by declaring certain zones off limits to human exploitation. Today we could reinterpret this as a form of "sacred property." The commons, as a modern form of inalienable property, can be seen as a reiteration of that insight. Alan Page Fiske (1993) and Kojin Karatani (2014) both conclude that the commons was the primary mode of exchange in indigenous civilizations, and that it kept an important role in the subsequent scaled-up tribal federations."