Local Functional Sovereignty
Description
Jonathan Hollis:
"Functional sovereignty starts at the smallest scales of human coordination and applies best to the practical reality of people’s day-to-day lives. The most relevant form of sovereignty for most people is their ability to exercise self-governance over their immediate surroundings with their nearest neighbors.
Nothing about local functional sovereignty is fundamentally new. People have been practicing a wide range of methods of local collective governance for as long as we’ve been using rudimentary language.[9] Modern society can be defined in terms of three sectors: public (states), private (markets), and plural (associations).[10] As markets and states have brought more of the commons under their regime, we’ve lost track of the crucial role that the functional sovereignty of plural association plays in a healthy society.
The local scale of functional sovereignty is crucial to broader-scale democratic governance. This idea is embedded in the US Constitution’s First Amendment, which protects “the right of the people peaceably to assemble”.[11] In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville made the case that “the germ and gradual development of that township independence … is the life and mainspring of American liberty”.[12]
Social movements throughout American history, from Thoreau to the hippie movement, have attempted to rediscover this mainspring of civilization by going ‘back-to-the-land’.[13] This idea is not originally American; for instance, Rousseau suggested those dissatisfied with society could “retire to the woods, there to lose the sight and remembrance of the crimes of your contemporaries”.[14] The capacity for local functional sovereignty is clearly highest in areas with low population density and limited existing government intervention. Recently, drastic reductions in the cost and minimum scale of solar power, battery storage, electric motors, modular housing, aerobic septic systems, and other technologies have made it cheaper and easier to develop off-grid functional sovereignty in rural areas.
For instance: in her introduction, de Filippi references Cabin, the project I work on, as an organization “paving the way for the advent of new network sovereignties.”[15] Cabin is building a network city of neighborhoods around the world where our community can live near friends and family.[16] We started out by building our first neighborhood in an unincorporated area of Texas, where there are no existing municipal regulations. Our community of amateurs has been able to collectively build extensive water, sewage, electrical, internet, and housing infrastructure from the ground up with almost no government involvement or intervention.
However, back-to-the-land movements have struggled to create lasting societal change due to their insular nature, the challenges of bootstrapping local economies, and an over-reliance on consensus governance processes.[17] Getting people to exit society, move to the middle of nowhere, and rebuild from scratch is incredibly difficult. While functional sovereignty is more constrained in areas with existing local government, it is also much more widely applicable because populated urban areas are where most people live.
The simplest acts of functional local sovereignty in urban areas involve practicing microsolidarity[18] with your existing neighbors. Examples of local voluntary collective action include the creation of community events, emergency preparedness caches, lending libraries, and other shared resources. Neighborhood groups can also make rogue improvements to urban public goods infrastructure through tactical urbanism[19], like the creation of unsanctioned community gardens, park benches, or bike lanes.[20] More advanced forms of functional collective action include developing third spaces, cohousing compounds, and microschools.
Another way to practice functional local sovereignty is to get a group of people to agree on local norms, rules, or behaviors and collectively enforce them. For example, a group of neighbors could agree to go on a weekly run each Saturday morning and hold each other accountable by fining members who don’t show up. You could start a regular potluck in the neighborhood park that only permits vegetarian food. A coliving house can evolve norms around whether drugs and alcohol are de facto allowed or disallowed, regardless of their de jure legal status."