Commons-Public Partnerships

Contextual Citation

Pat Conaty:

"We should link up social-public partnership and Commons-Public Partnerships. The important point to highlight is that social or commons must precede the state. Our elected representatives need to become again public servants and arrogant masters need to be rapidly recalled." (email, February 2014)

Description

David Bollier:

"A favorite scheme for many neoliberal politicians is to create public/private partnerships, or PPPs, that attempt to address pressing social problems through businesses/government collaboration in building infrastructure, providing services and so forth. However, many PPPs amount to little more than disguised giveaways. The state showers generous sums on companies that take on traditional state functions such as running prisons, healthcare systems, and schools. Or they buy the right to privatize revenues generated by public infrastructures such as toll-roads, bridges, and parking garages.

A clever twist on the public/private partnership is the commons/public partnership in which commoners act as working partners with municipal governments in tackling important need. An early example of this is the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons. This initiative of the Bologna, Italy, municipal government established a system whereby the city bureaucracy provides legal, financial, and technical support to projects initiated by commoners. These projects have included the management of eldercare centers, kindergartens, and public spaces as well as rehabilitating abandoned buildings. As Chris Iaione and Elena De Nictolis describe in Chapter xy, the Bologna Regulation – developed by the Italian think tank LabGov – has evolved into the Co-City Protocols, a methodology for guiding co-governance initiatives. The protocols are based on five design principles: “collective governance, enabling state, pooling economies, experimentalism, and technological justice.”

The point of the Co-City Protocols as a legal innovation is to leap beyond the known limitations of bureaucratic administration and leverage the social and creative energies of commoning. Numerous cities in Italy have adopted the Protocols as a way to rethink and enlarge the relationship between city bureaucracies and residents. It is an insight that the City of Ghent, Belgium, has taken to heart as well. In 2017, it commissioned an intensive study of scores of commons-based projects within its borders. It wanted to learn how it might augment the work of a neighborhood-managed church building, a renewable energy coop, and a temporary urban commons lab that provides space to many community projects. Any commons/public partnerships that result are likely to require legal hacks to define the shifting contours of state collaboration with commons."

(https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-11-17/hacking-the-law-to-open-up-zones-of-commoning/?)

Status

David Bollier:

"Commons/public partnerships As municipal governments struggle with waning budgets and service-delivery, and declining public trust, a number of city governments, academics and activists, especially in Europe, are actively developing commons/public partnerships as a new organizational form. The idea is to dismantle and redistribute some of the centralized, consolidated power of the state, so that collaborative partnerships between commoners and municipal government can develop, based on new types of distributed authority and responsibility.

We can get a sense of this trend in essays by Manuela Zechner (2024), by Pera and Bussu (2024), and Antonio Vesco and Sandro Busso (2024) in this volume, which discuss experiments in Barcelona, Bologna, Naples, along with other cities around the world including Bangkok, Ghent, and Seoul (New Geographies, 2021; Shareable, 2017). Both Bologna and Naples have boldly explored the use of legal innovations to support urban commons, blurring the public/private distinction and easing the public/commons clash. The experiments have opened the door for new forms of public/commons collaboration, leveraging the under-appreciated powers of ordinary people acting as commoners (Foster & Iaione, 2022). The tensions between commons and representative liberal democracy have not been erased – bureaucrats and politicians still take credit for the work of commoners, for example – but these experiments have created a new socio-political logic and validated the “micro-political” powers that Zechner identifies. This type of bottom-up energy is also playing out in fifteen cities that have declared themselves “Doughnut Cities” – inspired by Kate Raworth’s book, Doughnut Economics. Cities from Copenhagen and Amsterdam to Brussels and Melbourne are exploring innovative ways in which cities can renovate their economies to stay within ecological limits while meeting basic social needs. Another forty places around the world are internally exploring the potential of “the Doughnut” framework (Raworth, 2019; Doughnut Economics Action Lab, 2024).

These ambitions are encouraging, but of course it remains to be seen if such brave gambits will endure and expand. Despite some noteworthy commons/public partnerships around the world — mostly with municipal, not national governments – politicians and state officials generally find it difficult to embrace commons and other post-growth systems. They may realize that if people decommodify more aspects of their lives and reduce their dependencies on the market/state system, it could diminish their moral and political authority, along with economic growth and tax revenues."

(https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.5334/ijc.1389)