Resource Sovereignty Through Local and Bioregional Commons Associations
Discussion
James Quilligan:
"Local, municipal, and bioregional communities will be vested by their nations with the power and responsibility of resource sovereignty. In devolving subsidiarity to the areas where people reside and work, nations will grant their citizens the right to develop the local resources necessary to live within their own life force, abilities, and surroundings. Archaeology, anthropology, and evolutionary science have shown that long before states or markets existed, tribal societies expressed their well-being through the smallest-scale organizations capable of governing generative activity through food, water, land, ritual, and knowledge. Empowering this was the energy of people working together in local and regional environments, where wealth is conjoined and reciprocal (Redman 1999). In its indigenous form, a “sovereign” commons expresses the legitimacy of people to participate in mutual agreements for the place-based labor and knowledge that originate in environmental resources, regional habitats, and cultural traditions, often recalling the survival of their communities through agriculture, industry, technology, or war. In most societies today, resource democracy continues to motivate a variety of groups through the production of energy resource systems maintained within their social and ecological capacities (Odum and Odum 2001, 183--249; Ostrom 1990).
By reinvesting resource surpluses in community well-being rather than for profit, most tribal areas, small towns, farms, and bioregions remain the ontological basis of this Earth-centric experience. New forms of decision-making have also emerged as these centers of local power incentivize broader partnerships and solidarity among indigenous lands, rural environments, collectives, workplaces, and cities (Odum 2007, 332--79). For decades, translocal and transnational groups have been shaping powerful coalitions of youth and future generations, ecologists, climate justice circles, scientific guilds, and digital cooperatives through their shared identities and work (Bollier and Helfrich 2015; Cato 2013; Ribo 2012). By anchoring the power of sovereign resources, commons associations are becoming autonomous yet strategically implanted within larger state and planetary commons structures, sowing within them the incentives for ecological resilience, mutual support, and regenerative cooperation (Bauwens 2023). This reconfigures bioregional communities into living organs with political power, since they are the only groups that habitually observe the constraints of their biocapacity (the bounded conditions of land, matter, energy, ecology, and demographics), while working within the bioregional feedback loops that are the basis of their regenerative well-being. Commons networks are already burgeoning in numerous town and pastoral settings, attracting new generations of coworkers (Bollier and Helfrich 2019; Brewer 2023; Dolsak and Ostrom 2003). Cross-boundary collaboration is also spreading among many ecological and cultural basins, such as the Amazon, the Andes, the Alps, Normandy, and the Sahel. In translocal areas like these, bioregional assemblies, comprising residents, indigenous stewards, aid networks, cooperatives, community planners, local governments, and scientists, are eagerly expanding. With newly found subsidiarity from their nations, these varied watershed councils, regional land trusts, and regenerative farms will gain greater political authority to administer local land use, water rights, and cultural norms through their energy budgets, using deliberative processes such as open source governance to track the stocks and flows of energy within their local and regional commons (Odum 1996; Ostrom 1990).
Instead of the core-periphery dynamics that have made municipalities bitter competitors with communities and bioregions for resources in the past, they will partner much more closely. For instance, as city planning and policy align with adjacent bioregional commons for watershed management, water-sharing compacts, seed banks, reforestation corridors, migration guidelines, and climate resilience buffers, they will confederate through mutual assemblies, knowledge exchanges, and community trading pools (Dolsak and Ostrom 2003). A commons reserve value could then be created to undergird redeemable vouchers in the collective exchange networks of thousands of municipal/bioregional communities. This rebalancing of power through the adaptive cycles within regional systems could be expressed through all strata of governance, not only in lawmaking, but thermodynamically synchronized at scale, engaging the self-sustainment and well-being of future generations and nonhuman life. Rather than draw upon debt-based assets, currencies, and investments that are underpinned by the “sovereign reserve value” of climate degradation and energy depletion, the biophysical practices in commons communities will result in block-level ledgers, commons reserve currencies, bioregional trusts, and public banks for bioregenerative financing."