Federated Scaling

Description

Rok Krancj et al.:

"The concept of scale that underlies this vision is distributed – in this paper we propose the concept of “federated scaling.” Instead of either scaling up one central approach, as would be resembled by a UN-mandated global initiative against climate change, or scaling out one “best practice” approach to a coalition of nation states, federated scaling is conceived as a process of integrating heterogeneous forms of collective action into a framework that allows them to collaborate while acknowledging their interrelations and differences, and to formally account for them through shared expressions of value and structures of mutual stake-holding. It shares this inclusivity with the notion of wide and deep scaling (Moore et al., 2015; Olsson et al., 2017), which proposes a shift away from the global dominance of the cultural exports of a handful of U.S. tech companies and toward agnostic protocols that facilitate the peaceful coexistence of heterogeneous cultures and the resolution of conflict through community-based dispute resolution tools. In this light, we position federated scaling as a broader social and political economic transformation project that conceptualizes the commons and their value orientations as an example of counter-hegemonic prefigurative politics. In so doing, it recognizes the questions of scale, scaling and scalability hinting at a much broader range of questions, namely, the assumptions, theories, strategies and mechanisms – in essence, the politics – of and for change." (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2021.578721/full)