View source for Commoning and Relational Approaches to Governance

'''* Report: Ontology as a Hidden Driver of Politics and Policy Commoning and Relational Approaches to Governance. By Zack Walsh and the Commons Strategies Group. CSG, IASS, September 2019'''

URL = https://cdn6.commonsstrategies.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Zack-Walsh_Ontology-as-a-Hidden-Driver-of-Politics_def2.pdf?

''A Deep Dive co-hosted by the Commons Strategies Group and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, September 9-12, 2019''


=Description=

"Ontology is the study of how we perceive the nature of being. Reading political
and economic texts through ontological perspectives allows us to uncover the
underlying hidden assumptions informing them. Different frameworks of
governance presuppose different assumptions about reality (Stout and Love,
2019). Today’s mainstream political and economic discourses are increasingly
sterile and unfit in large part because they are based on incorrect assumptions
about the nature of being. The whole explanatory apparatus informing
mainstream politics and economics is fundamentally Eurocentric and outdated,
informed by centuries’ old science and philosophy. In this moment of crisis, rethinking governance requires more than re-thinking organizations, structures,
and positions—it requires re-thinking the underlying belief systems, value
systems, and ethics that inform them.

We must re-examine our assumptions about humans and nonhumans, agency,
rationality, and society. This is especially true within the discourse on the
commons. The logic of the commons is so different from liberal democracy
and market capitalism that it is necessary to rethink the ontological premises
informing it. Elinor Ostrom’s institutional analysis and development framework,
for example, is the dominant approach to understanding the commons, yet
it takes for granted many of the same foundational assumptions of standard
political and economic thought. Shifting the paradigm within which we
understand governance offers immense transformative potential.

...


Making an OntoShift, or ontological shift,
toward process-relational ontology helps provide a better apparatus for
explaining the complexity and diversity of the commons and offers much
greater potential to transform society via the logic of the commons.
This report builds on this insight by offering a synthesis of findings from 18
experts who, at a three-day workshop, discussed how shifting the ontological
premises of political and economic thought toward process-relational ontology
could transform society. The workshop, called “Onto-seeding Societal
Transformation,” was co-hosted by the Commons Strategies Group and the
Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, in Neudenau, Germany, between
September 9-12, 2019. It consisted of three successive sessions focused on
process-relational approaches to ontology, design patterns, and politics. A final,
fourth session focused on the integration of ontology, patterns, and politics
in concrete case studies. This report concludes with new questions and next
steps for strategically advancing relational approaches to governance and the
commons."

[[Category:Relational]]
[[Category:Articles]]
[[Category:Conferences]]
[[Category:Commons]]