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
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 The whole explanatory apparatus informing mainstream politics and economics is fundamentally Eurocentric and outdated, informed by centuries’ old science and philosophy.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."