Cooperative Democracy Charter -Grenoble, France
Description
Synthesis via z.ai, prompted by Michel Bauwens:
The Cooperative Democracy Charter (French: Charte de la démocratie coopérative) is the founding legal-political text of the commons-centric municipal regime adopted by the city of Grenoble, France, on 28 March 2022 through deliberation no. 28161 of its city council. Presented by deputy mayor Anne-Sophie Olmos in her capacity as delegate for commons, the charter takes the form of a deliberative statement of principles rather than a contract or a regulation. It establishes the doctrinal frame within which two operational devices — the cooperation pact and the citizen-action certificate — are thereafter applied. Together, these three instruments constitute the legal architecture of Grenoble's commons regime and position the city, in the French-language scholarly reception, as the principal French counterpart to the Bologna Regulation on Urban Commons in Italian administrative law.
Characteristics
The six principles
The charter articulates six principles that together govern the city's posture toward citizen cooperation. The first, coopération, requires the city to open the governance of common goods to stakeholders, to transform them into commons, and to accept citizen contributions to their care. The second, accessibilité et accompagnement du pouvoir d'agir, commits the city to communication and transparency about its own devices, to accessibility, and to active capacity-building for citizens' power to act. The third, valorisation de l'expertise citoyenne, formalizes the city's recognition of citizen expertise and is operationalized through the pact and the certificate. The fourth, innovation juridique, mandates the development of legal tools that allow the inclusion of any willing person and provide legal protection to citizen actors operating under the regime. The fifth, administration coopérative, commits the municipal apparatus to horizontal governance, inter-service cooperation, and a "faire en commun" logic of working together — framed explicitly as a complement to municipal action rather than a substitution for it. The sixth, respect des communs, commits the city to favour the emergence of initiatives and commons at the intersection of its own policy fields.
A seventh principle — sometimes rendered as "contribution" or "complementarity, not substitution" — appears in some secondary renderings of the charter, notably in the Remix the Commons wiki entry. On closer reading, it is best understood as a sub-principle of administration coopérative rather than a freestanding article; the canonical six-principle count, drawn from the official deliberation text, should be retained unless future municipal communications revise it.
The charter has attracted attention in French-language scholarship and political commentary on public-commons partnerships from 2022 onward. The Observatoire des Tiers-Lieux published an early substantive analysis in its 2022 article on "partenariats publics-communs", including an extended interview with Anne-Sophie Olmos that articulates the political rationale of the charter and its six principles. Thomas Perroud's October 2026 introduction to the French translation of the Bologna regulation, published by EnCommuns, explicitly frames Grenoble as "the first French city to have undertaken a similar approach [to Bologna], while remaining anchored in the French juridical and cultural context," and positions the charter as the French equivalent of the Bologna regulation's role in Italian administrative law. The Remix the Commons wiki maintains a dedicated entry on the Grenoble regime under the title "Administration coopérative et communs à Grenoble," which provides a seven-principle rendering of the charter that warrants comparison against the canonical six-principle text of the deliberation.
Discussion
Relationship to the Bologna regulation
The charter stands in direct doctrinal lineage with the Bologna regulation of 2014, which pioneered the use of municipal regulations to govern collaboration pacts between cities and citizens for the care of urban commons under Article 118, paragraph 4, of the Italian Constitution (the principle of horizontal subsidiarity). The two texts share a common chart-and-pact architecture: a statement of governing principles, supplemented by an operational instrument (the patto di collaborazione in Bologna, the pacte de coopération in Grenoble) by which informal citizen initiatives are formally recognized and supported by the city. Both texts deliberately widen the circle of admissible signatories to include individuals, informal committees, structured associations, and businesses, and both are explicitly framed as complementary to municipal action rather than substitutive of it. The Grenoble charter nonetheless differs from the Bologna regulation in two respects: it takes the form of a charter of principles adopted by deliberation rather than a regulation, reflecting the French institutional preference for in-house administrative reform over municipal-charta enactment; and it adds a third, French-specific operational layer — the citizen-action certificate — that has no equivalent in the Italian model.
Relationship to the Neapolitan uso civico e collettivo urbano
The charter also stands in a more diffuse doctrinal relationship with the Neapolitan uso civico e collettivo urbano (urban civic and collective use), the device conceptualized by the urban commons movement in the city of Naples and carried by the experience of the community of the Asilo following the 2012 occupation of the Ex-Asilo Filangieri. Where the Bologna regulation grounds its collaboration pacts in Article 118, paragraph 4, the Neapolitan device grounds collective self-management of commons in Articles 42 and 43 of the Italian Constitution — the social function of property and the collective self-management of goods. The Grenoble charter is doctrinally a cousin, not a descendant, of the Neapolitan device: the two texts share a concern with the collective administration of common goods by user communities, but Grenoble's legal basis is the French municipal code and the city's own deliberative authority rather than a constitutional property regime. The charter nonetheless picks up the second, Naples-style doctrinal pole in its broader application — most visibly in the Parlement de la rivière Isère, a citizen-led river-parliament commons that maps onto the Neapolitan civic-use device applied at inter-municipal, river-basin scale.
More information
Sources
Deliberation no. 28161 — "Municipalisme / Communs : Principes pour une administration coopérative", Conseil municipal de Grenoble, 28 March 2022. https://praxis.encommun.io/media/notes/note_4236/deliberation_28161.pdf
Ville de Grenoble — "Les communs" (page officielle). https://www.grenoble.fr/761-les-communs.htm
Remix the Commons — "Administration coopérative et communs à Grenoble", 4 May 2022. https://wiki.remixthecommons.org/index.php/Administration_coop%C3%A9rative_et_communs_%C3%A0_Grenoble
Observatoire des Tiers-Lieux — "Partenariats publics-communs : vers une démocratie coopérative ?" (interview with Anne-Sophie Olmos and Franck Quéré). https://observatoire.francetierslieux.fr/vers-des-partenariats-publics-communs-lexemple-de-grenoble
Les Communs d'abord — "Principes pour une administration coopérative (Grenoble, 28 mars 2022)". https://www.les-communs-dabord.org/principes-pour-une-administration-cooperative-grenoble-28-mars-2022 ' EnCommuns' — Thomas Perroud, introduction to the French translation of the Bologna regulation, 14 October 2026. https://www.encommuns.net/articles/2026-10-14-les-partenariats-public-commun-lexemple-de-bologne/
Internal links
Mission Communs de la ville de Grenoble
Citizen Action Certificate - Grenoble, France
[Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons]] · · · ·