Territorial Commons with a Social Purpose - France
= the specific example discussed here are the TZCLD, which stands for Territoires Zéro Chômeur de Longue Durée, and which translates to "Zero Long-Term Unemployment Territories.
Description
< "A local commons is a citizen-originated, self-governed entity, oriented towards serving social utility and preserving the common good" (La Coop des Communs, 2024). > - Benjamin Coriat.
Coop des Communs on:
By broadening the field of the commons, initially confined to natural resources (Ostrom, 2010), to other dimensions of economic and social life such as employment, education or culture, research work has identified the category of social commons (Defalvard, 2017) and highlighted the purpose of collective action (Sauvêtre, 2016).
According to this sociologist, the characteristics of a social commons are as follows:
- pursuit of a common social and solidarity-based purpose,
- formation of a shared interest through collective governance arising from the diversity of interests,
- recognition of self-organisation by the State,
- social right of the excluded / beneficiaries to participate in the commons.
Daniel Le Guillou on the TZCLD as social commons:
"Unlike conventional employment policies, TZCLD is not a top-down mechanism based on administrative criteria. It is not an enforceable right established in a centralised manner. It is managed by a local employment committee (CLE) which, relying on a project team, is responsible for:
- bringing together all stakeholders concerned by the prolonged lack of decent employment in the territory and involved in the commons that constitutes the project's objective (the realisation of the right),
- defining the conditions for access to this right (the prolonged lack of decent employment),
- defining the governance rules for this right in accordance with the project's fundamental principles (project value framework): offering access to this right to those concerned by creating decent jobs, permanent contracts with hours chosen by employees, commensurate with the territory's needs, in non-competitive activities that are useful to the territory and adapted to the abilities and wishes of those concerned; enabling everyone to express themselves on an equal footing.
Due to its funding (the savings and gains generated by hiring people who have been durably deprived of employment), the right to decent employment under TZCLD can be considered a commons with a social purpose "under public guarantee" (Le Guillou, 2022), or as a "local commons" (La Coop des Communs, 2024)."
(translated from the French: https://nextcloud.coopdescommuns.org/index.php/s/XgssJY9q9J8ZmYw?)
Discussion
"A coordination model based on polycentric governance: the TZCLD case
This coordination model is all the more demanding given that the project's governance is polycentric. The existence of several centres participating in the project's governance and enjoying a certain degree of autonomy makes it more difficult to maintain strategic alignment over time and to adopt a common management framework.
In the TZCLD case, the project is implemented around three centres: a national centre comprising the territorial experimentation fund against long-term unemployment and the State, and two territorial centres represented by the CLE and the EBE.
Under the authority of the State, the territorial experimentation fund against long-term unemployment (ETCLD) carries out a number of missions defined by law, including the accreditation of territories and the financing of jobs. The coordination model includes a partnership with the State via the public employment service and a funding guarantee from the relevant public administrations.
In each territory, the CLE (supported by the project team) and the EBE contribute to achieving a common objective: making the right to employment effective. They do so with shared responsibilities (respecting non-competition, avoiding selection, ensuring job retention) and specific responsibilities (achieving exhaustiveness is the responsibility of the CLE and the project team for its implementation; job creation, production of goods and services, company management, and work organisation within the company fall under the EBE).
Good coordination between these three centres and their alignment with the project's fundamental principles (constitutional-choice rules in Ostrom's sense) and the same collective-choice rules standardised at the national level, as presented in Table 2, are conditions largely established by the consolidation of lessons learned and by evaluation work for the viability of a TZCLD project in a territory; territories and commoners being decision-makers regarding operational rules. The analysis of TZCLD as a substitute for a failing public service, through the lens of the commons, shows that the solution to the issue of prolonged job deprivation must include a "public service" aspect, but with governance responsibility situated at the territorial level.
It is therefore a matter of managing the tension between territorial equity, based in part on a certain degree of standardisation – both to encourage widespread deployment and to avoid the deviations observed in the experiment – and the preservation of a certain territorial autonomy, which is inherent to the project.
Thus, one might consider that:
- constitutional-choice rules (see Table 2) deal with the option right based on the voluntary participation of territories (application, definition of the exhaustiveness strategy based on a territorial diagnosis of employment and unemployment, coordination of the various territorial bodies within the framework of the law of 18 December 2023 for full employment, etc.) and not a generalised right across the entire territory,
- collective-choice rules concern the principles and key concepts (decent employment, prolonged lack of decent employment),
- operational rules aim to guarantee territorial autonomy in their implementation (assessment of prolonged lack of decent employment and non-competition, definition of useful activities, etc.) while respecting collective-choice rules.
Within the governance of the CLE, the presence of all relevant territorial stakeholders is not always effective, particularly with regard to businesses. The first requirement therefore concerns the representativeness of the CLE (local authorities, institutional bodies, associations, social workers, but also business owners and people durably deprived of employment). The same applies to the change in posture of institutional actors (prescriber vs. supporter) and the operating rules that foster the participation of the commons' beneficiaries. The question of employee participation in defining activities and work organisation also needs to be raised in connection with the design of a management approach that is intended to be inclusive in principle, but is not always so in practice (Autant-Dorier et al., 2025).
While this coordination model makes it possible to overcome the limitations of both the market and the State, it does not inherently carry a guarantee of "institutional performance" or sustainability. The collective that upholds the commons is fundamentally heterogeneous and traversed by usual social relations. However, these do not constitute an analytical criterion used by E. Ostrom "to understand how systems of collective rules are instituted" (Harribey, 2013). Taking into account subjectivities relating to gender and social class is essential for analysing how individuals perceive their relationships with others (whether human or non-human), and the implementation of institutions is decisive for the results obtained (Nightingale, 2011)."
(translated from the French: https://nextcloud.coopdescommuns.org/index.php/s/XgssJY9q9J8ZmYw?)