Green-Digital Transition Through Commons-Based Decentralized Planning

* Article: Green-Digital Transition Through Commons-Based Decentralized Planning. By Pedro H. J. Nardelli and Rodrigo Santaella-Goncalves Globalizations, September 2025

URL = https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2025.2555504

Descriptions

"“The green-digital transition promoted by governmental bodies relies heavily on market mechanisms that benefit large technology and energy corporations. Literature demonstrates that this approach fails to accomplish its goals of reducing poverty, inequality, and harmful emissions. These are results of the political economy and the social ecology of capital. This paper proposes an alternative framework grounded in a commons-based political economy and decentralized planning without monetary mediation or compulsory labour. We argue that cyber-physical systems (CPSs) can support the coordination of production and distribution in ways that align with democratic and ecological priorities. Using a scalable, distributed optimization algorithm, we demonstrate how CPSs can facilitate bottom-up and top-down coordination across various scales. Through thought experiments, we explore the feasibility of these systems. The experimental application of such tools may contribute to broader systemic transformation by enabling collective self-organization and demonstrating the viability of alternative social arrangements.”