View source for Toward a New Multilateralism of the Global Commons

'''Article: People Sharing Resources. Toward a New Multilateralism of the Global Commons. James Bernard Quilligan'''

URL = http://www.kosmosjournal.org/kjo2/bm~doc/people-sharing-resources.pdf

http://www.kosmosjournal.org/articles/people-sharing-resources-toward-a-new-multilateralism-of-the-global-commons

Published in [http://www.kosmosjournal.org Kosmos Journal], Fall | Winter 2009, [http://www.kosmosjournal.org]. The original article contains a number of tables and figures not reproduced here and is a well-edited and presented pdf version.


=Text=

==The Limits to Private and [[Public Goods]]==

"The opening decades of this century are
a pivotal time in which many of our
current beliefs and practices will be reexamined.
During the last century, the
economic and political catastrophes
that befell the world inspired an earlier
generation to create a multilateral system
defined by an unprecedented vision
of cooperation and security for the
international community. It promised
that global private goods (financial investment,
private credit and trade) and
global public goods (aid, loans through
the International Monetary Fund and
World Bank and other assistance from
international development programs) would resolve the world’s
major domestic and trans-border economic problems. But this
grand experiment in international cooperation has failed
miserably.

For generations our resources have been under assault from global
market forces, regional and national policy development, and inadequate
legal recognition of common property rights. State capitalism,
powered by cheap labor, fossil fuels, low commodity prices
and unrealistic interest rates, has generated a planet wide ‘fire sale,’
liquidating Earth’s resources at an increasingly rapid pace. Now
this centuries-long credit boom of natural and material resources
is ending as we stare, incredulously, into a gigantic void of our
own making.We have begun to see that the benefits of perpetual
economic growth are not compensating for the vast damages and
risks they create—from energy insecurity, global warming, ecological
degradation and species loss to hunger, poverty, debt and
financial meltdown. We’re also realizing that neither the private
sphere of property and trade nor the public sphere of government
provision and distribution—which created these problems to begin
with—are capable of solving them. On one hand, international
commerce cannot address the harmful externalities that transcend
borders because global ‘private’ goods are profit-driven for the
benefit of consumers and shareholders, not equity-driven for the
masses. On the other hand, sovereign governments are not
equipped to manage global problems either by themselves or
through a global institutional framework, since there is no actual
‘public’ governance at the international level to effectively
manage and protect these resources for the world’s people
as a whole.



==[[Tragedy of Enclosures]]==

Beginning with Garrett Hardin’s classic example of shepherds who
share a field to graze their flocks — but unwittingly cause the land
to be overused and degraded—the idea of scarcity through over-consumption
has been called a tragedy of the commons.


There are countless instances of openly-accessed resources becoming vulnerable
to encroachment and misuse, leading to acute social or
ecological problems. Yet Elinor Ostrom and others have shown
that failed commons are not inevitable. When local users communicate,
build trust, and organize to create rules to govern how
their resources should be used, they can protect their commons
from overuse in the interest of the common good.

So the primary challenge facing the world is not one of failed commons.

Rather, it’s a tragedy of enclosures — the legalization of private
property and commodity exchange by the state, and the
transference and overuse of commonly managed resources by the
marketplace.

The history of the privatization of capital and natural
resources is well known. Beginning in the 12th century in
northern Europe, and intensifying during the 16th century, the
emerging free market laid claim to what seemed to be an endless
supply of natural resources existing in empty and limitless space.
Enterprising merchants, bankers and politicians enclosed these
‘vacant’ areas and turned them into legally titled property. Over
the past several centuries, similar enclosure movements have
spread across the world, subjugating and extracting resources
which were previously un-ownable, fully accessible and often governed
by local custom. Under the system of property rights and
sovereign boundaries that has evolved, resource managers (public
sector) and producers and providers (private sector) are kept
distinctly separate from resource users (commoners). 

These social divisions produce and reproduce the modern institutional
norms of economic management and the creation of market value
through profit and interest, which are said to be the basis of dynamic
social progress and economic growth. But through this
process of wealth creation, poor and native peoples have been
evicted from their villages and lands and displaced from their
means of subsistence, while customary rights and traditions over
resources are criminalized. 

The history of enclosures is a legacy
of struggle and violence over rightful claims to property, which
continues today.


==[[Global Common Goods]]==

"Perhaps what we are anticipating, but have been unable to define
because of society’s pervasive commitment to free markets in driving
global economic integration and to sovereign reciprocity in
making global decisions, is the idea of global common goods —
the shared resources that fall outside the domains of both private
and public goods.

The commons exist at the intersection of society
and nature and are expressed in many contexts of life. 

They include a wide diversity of collectively inherited or produced resources
belonging to all human beings equally.

These commons — whether local, state, interstate, regional or global in scope—connect
us to the things we share and need to survive on all levels of human
activity. Yet, because ‘the commons’ are not part of our everyday
vocabulary or worldview, they are often unrecognized.We have to
refocus our conditioned mental categories to recognize the broad
range of commons that exist all around and within us



Some of these resources—cultural, social and intellectual—are renewable.
Many others—natural, genetic and material resources —
are not (or may be replenishable at very slow rates). At first glance,
such differences may seem trivial. Yet the modern economic interpretation
of these differences—that various commons are more
or less replenishable — has led to our civilization-wide crisis.

The prevailing assumption by state capitalism that the natural, genetic
and material world is infinitely replenishable, and that any scarcities
of non-renewable resources can be managed through the price
system, has led to the market imperative of unlimited economic
growth. It’s provided the ‘empirical’ and ideological justifications
for the profit motive, speculation, capital accumulation, unrealistic
levels of production and consumption, misallocated resources,
debt, unemployment, inequality, boom-bust cycles, global competition
for resources and exploitation of the world’s poor.

That doctrine is now being challenged by people outside of the
private and public sectors through their reintegration of the various
types of commons. In transcending the polarized relationship
between business and government, this commons movement
is emerging as a potent counterforce to state capitalism. It represents
a consciously organized third sector, including citizens as
co-managers and co-producers in the shared management and
preservation of their own resources.

The commons are not just resources but the sets of relationships
they create, including the communities that use them, and the
cultural and social practices and property regimes that manage
them.

They represent the common responsibility of people to protect
and sustain their valuable common goods. But unlike local
common goods, which have a familiar legacy of ownership, global
common goods have yet to be defined clearly in terms of their interconnectedness,
common history and planetary rights. Participatory
rules and institutions have not been fully developed for
cross-border commons—including outer space and the atmosphere,
the oceans and sea-beds, world food supplies and water
sources, population growth and migration, technology and media,
and trade and finance. It’s clear that human society needs to build
a much deeper awareness and stronger identity between its local
and global commons.

The decision-making, social cohesion and
collective wealth implicit in common goods must be able to scale
up and down. Local commons groups need the technical support
and knowledge of a [[Commons-based Multilateralism]]; yet
multilateral rules and institutions must also embody the expertise
and skills of community groups based on decisions made at the
grassroots.

Ultimately, the governance and production of common goods,
both locally and transnationally, will shift the emphasis of government
away from the sanctioning of private industry. It will
redirect this power and authority in two directions—upward toward
the sanctioning of the international commons under a restructured multilateralism,
and downward toward the sanctioning
of local commons by the world’s citizens under widespread commons
agreements. To create scale-free commons, local and global
commons groups must share a commitment not to exploit the
scarcity-value of depletable resources. As a result, the focus of the
private sector will also move away from devaluing commons resources
as unaccountable external costs, and businesses will adopt
a framework of property management and value that reflects a
more accurate measure of the actual costs of resource production.


==[[Co-Governance]]==

Until the modern era of enclosure and commodification, communities
had always made up their own rules for creating and
maintaining local resources. Unlike the world’s public and private
sectors, commoners have broad experience in the supervision and
sustenance of living systems to ensure equitable ways of sharing
their uses and benefits. 

This knowledge — which is still held and
practiced by many indigenous peoples and community groups —
is now being rediscovered. People across the world are returning
to the transparent stewardship of their local commons and becoming
involved as providers as well as recipients of resources,
goods and services. Now, however, the commons involves more
than just the stewardship of natural and material resources:

- modern technologies have also created a new generation of
cultural commons with unique forms of participation and social
capital. Co-governance involves the principle of subsidiarity—taking
decisions at the lowest possible level of authority and creating
new checks and balances on the overall decision-making activities
of the state.

The inclusion of people in the decisions that directly
affect them formalizes the process of just governance and
democratic oversight by closing the gap between resource users
and resource managers, producers and providers. Co-governance
thus entails the development of non-centralized rules and
institutions pertaining to the major questions of access, control,
use and distribution of the wealth generated on a commons.

These activities evolve out of the shared meaning and values of the stakeholders
who depend upon a resource for their survival and well being.

The sharing of duties and decision-making over the use,
protection and replenishment of a particular resource therefore
requires personal and group qualities such as moral responsibility,
reciprocity, trust, mutual aid, fellowship and cooperation.

The kinds of expertise and understanding that people have developed
through the local management of resources must be scaled
up to the global level. Incentives for sharing the global commons
need to be built into multilateral rules and institutions. By the
same token, local development needs an international support
system that is generative in purpose—not technocratic, nationalistic
or commercial. It’s really not global governance that is required,
but global co-governance.

This mutual governance would
involve independent states giving regulatory legitimacy and authority
to global institutions through international standards for
the management and protection of global common goods. Initially,
these common goods could be created through a cooperative
system for managing long-term risks, such as degradation of
Earth’s living systems, global climate change, nuclear proliferation,
terrorism, trade protectionism, security of global supplies,
threats of fragile and failed states, and unequal representation of
developing nations in global decision-making.


==[[Co-Production]]==

While co-governance brings together resource users and managers,
co-production involves the collaboration of resource users
and resource producers and providers through open social networks.
Increasingly, traditional social divisions between production
and reproduction of commons resources are disappearing
and unique forms of social and cultural meaning are emerging.

Many people are finding new identity and significance through
sharing information, seeking consensus-based solutions, keeping
value in their communities, and distributing the benefits that arise
from the use of commons resources. Countless hub-culture communities
are forming, not only on the internet, but also through
local, regional and global organizations.

A notable development in many of these networked relationships
is the free labor and creativity that are generated without financial
incentives or rewards. When users are directly involved in the
production and delivery of goods and services, they develop
cooperative skills, knowledge and wealth beyond the constraints
of extractive profits, patents, trademarks, copyrights, traditional
ownership, paid work, commodity values and other value-added
measures. Social production thus entails not only new forms of
property management, but also a different measure of value.

This new capital—based on communication, care, respect, validation,
cooperation, common welfare and transparent decision-making
—  is reframing the political debate on commons resource
management and the direct production of social and cultural
wealth.

As mentioned, the idea of ‘global public goods’ created by sovereign
nations is really a non-sequitur since there is no international
framework corresponding to domestic public government which
is designed to manage resources for the people of the world as a
whole. But we are recognizing that another form of global goods
—social innovation, networked collaboration, collective action,
voluntary associations, peer support networks and multi-stakeholder
participation—is being created at the international level.

It’s possible that the co-production of global common goods can
now be facilitated through direct collaboration between local resource
users and multilateral institutions, where service users become
involved in the mutual support and delivery of goods and
services.

The creation of a global resource pool entails an entirely
new phase of multilateralism, in which nations collectively agree
to preserve and protect the various commons of Earth and maintain
a pool of shared production and goods large enough to provide
for everyone’s needs. In giving up a portion of their
sovereignty, rich nations would recycle their excess resources
through this global clearinghouse, which would then be redistributed
to poor nations needing assistance. 


The resources required
for production and the goods that are produced would go
into this common pool, and the goods which people consume or
use would come from it.


==[[Social Charters]]==

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees to every
person the freedom from want and fear. This is a good beginning.

Yet because human rights are dependent on government to legitimate
them, the UN Declaration does not redirect the source of
these rights away from sovereign governments to the sovereign
people of a particular commons. As global citizens, regardless of
national obligations, we have a responsibility to engage in areas
of community and transborder action where the state and private
sectors have little jurisdiction, authority or experience. Commons
rights differ from human rights and civil rights because they arise,
not through the legislation of a state, but through a customary or
emerging identification with an ecology, a cultural resource area,
a social need, or a form of collective labor. Commons rights affirm
the sovereignty of human beings over their means of sustenance
and well-being. 


They vest us with a moral authority and social
legitimacy to make decisions and create agreements on the sharing
of resources that ensure our rights to survival and security.
This creates an entirely new context for collective action. Instead
of seeking individual and human rights from the state, people may
begin to claim long-term authority over resources, governance and
social value as their planetary birthrights—both at a community
and global level. Commons rights provide an important basis for
creating covenants and institutions that are not state-managed to
negotiate the protection and sustenance of resources and ensure
that the mutual interests of all stakeholders are directly represented.
through the assertion of people’s inherent rights to a commons,
the role of the state would become much more balanced
between enabling the corporate sector and enabling citizens. Instead
of regulating commerce and finance in the public interest
(while also regulating the commons for the benefit of commerce
and finance), the new duty of the state would be to confirm the
declarations of the rights of people to their commons, allowing
them to manage their own resources by recognizing and upholding
their social charters and commons trusts.

A social charter is a social and institutional framework providing
incentives for the management and protection of commons resources.
Creating a social charter requires the support and involvement
of people across a region or community of interest who
depend on specific common goods for their livelihood and welfare.
A social charter can be developed for a single commons or for
overlapping commons.

Given the uniqueness of every commons, there is no universal
template for social charters—but a baseline is emerging. A social
charter for a commons should include, at minimum, a summary
of traditional or emerging claims to legitimacy; a declaration of
the rights and entitlements of users and producers; a code of
ethics; elaboration of common values and standards; a statement
of benefits; a notice of claims to reparations or re-territorialization
of boundaries; and a practical framework for cooperation.
Democratic and transparent decision-making for the maintenance
and preservation of a particular commons would be developed
through the collective action of citizens, customary
representatives, social networks, academics, scientists, bilateral
donors, development partners, regional organizers, intergovernmental
organizations,media and other stakeholders—with limited
input from national governments and the private sector. Citizens
who create a social charter thus ensure that administrative power
is decentralized in order to maintain community access to—and
sovereignty over—their own commons.


==[[Commons Trusts]]==

While social charters ensure a broad political foundation for the
co-governance and co-production of common property regimes,
they do not make them operational.

That requires the development
of commons trusts, which establish the specific legal conditions

[[Trusts]] are institutions, usually involving both physical and financial
assets, which preserve and manage resources inherited from
past generations on behalf of present and future generations. By
definition, commons trusts are the only fiduciary institutions accountable
for the long-term preservation and sustenance of a resource.

That’s because neither of our existing property regimes — private nor public—have a mandate to provide fair access and
long-term protection for critical resources. Under its current operational
rules and institutions, state capitalism has forsaken such
long-term fiscal responsibility by neglecting to keep the actual
value of the commons separate from the mainstream economy.


This commingling of accounts is why, under the present system,
the private and public sectors are spending both the ‘principal’
and the ‘interest’ of the commons — leading to currency volatility
and boom-bust cycles, and contributing enormously to the
planet’s ecological, energy and political instability.


The creation of commons trusts allows the private and public sectors
to continue to focus on profit, investment and budgetary appropriations,
while the commons becomes a primary means of
stabilizing the principal of commons reserves to maintain the diversity
and sustainability of the overall economy. 

Commons trustees have two functions. First, they have a responsibility to decide
what proportion of their commons resources should be monetized
by renting them to the private sector for extraction and
production. A percentage of this resource rent would then be distributed
to citizens by the state as dividends (or used for other
purposes such as maintenance of the commons goods which are
being rented, or mitigation of the negative effects of renting these
goods). Commons trusts thus guarantee that those who are unprotected
have rights to basic sustenance from their own resources.
Yet the needs of present beneficiaries are a secondary
responsibility.

The primary obligation of trust managers is to keep
the value created through the commons within the commons to
the extent possible, so that the community can hold in reserve the
larger portion of its natural, genetic, and material stock for the
benefit of people and species yet unborn, while generating cultural,
social and intellectual capital for current generations. In this
way, the harmful effects of state capitalism are rebalanced: private
industry flourishes from the surplus resources which are rented
from commons trusts, the socially marginalized and vulnerable
receive a subsistence income from the state, and the primary assets
of the commons are preserved and regenerated. 

This dynamic equilibrium is achieved through new temporal modalities in the
system of multilateral co-governance and co-production
introduced through the creation of commons trusts across the world
for people to help each other manage and produce what each of
them needs. Land and forest trusts are familiar examples.


==[[Commons]]==

In this emerging multilateral system, the financial incentives of
businesses and government continue to operate as before. But the
difference now is that the long-term wealth guaranteed by commons
trusts is not generated through the potential financial revenue
of the commons assets they are managing. Instead of
regarding these commons as a source of profit, commons trusts
determine their intrinsic worth (the actual value of passing on
what we have inherited to future generations and allowing this
stock to be replenished and restored) through the full participatory
choice of citizens on whether or not to spend this commons
capital. Commons trusts thus create a new time signature based
on the preservation of commons resources and the resilience of
the system that manages and produces them—not on the assets of
the commons that may have financial value in the marketplace.

Hence, long-term wealth arises, not through consumer demand,
investment or capital accumulation, but in the enhancement of
the carrying capacity of the global commons to support life and
life systems, expressed through sustainable choice.


Broadly speaking, the creation of local commons trusts worldwide
entails three significant changes:

• government shifts its primary emphasis from issuing corporate
charters and licensing the private sector to approving social charters
and open licenses for resource preservation and cultural and
social production through commons trusts

• commons trusts exercise a fiduciary duty to preserve natural, genetic
and material commons but can decide to rent a proportion
of these resource rights to businesses

• businesses may rent the rights to extract and produce a resource
from a commons trust, creating profits and positive externalities
through innovation, competitive products and services, and adjustment
of the market to the actual costs of resources.


==[[Commons Reserve Currency]] ==

Under the present economic system,money is created by national
governments and private banks through loans. To maintain the
supply of money needed to repay both the interest and principal
on these loans, banks must continually find new credit applicants
to create sufficient demand for more loans. Hence, banks are
continually pushing credit, driving corporations to borrow more
to produce, and citizens to borrow more to consume.

This is our
global dilemma. On one hand, no amount of corporate production
and consumer spending can satisfy the banks’ continual demands
for repayment of these loans; on the other, the algorithm
of perpetual economic growth
adopted by banks, corporations
and consumers has no offsetting
formula for repaying the accumulating
debt and redeeming the
damage that this compulsive
growth is wreaking on the commons.

In terms of non-renewable
resources such as oil — as well as
many other renewable resources — human society has been spending
not only the interest but significant
portions of the principal.

If we do not reverse this situation —
if bank-driven overproduction
and overconsumption continue to generate speculation and
hoarding of physical and financial assets, loan defaults and job
losses, hunger and poverty, and carbon emissions and climate
change—soon the planet will not only have diminishing returns
from the interest on its commons resources, but the principal itself
will be gone.

Since the money system and individual purchasing power are social
commons, perhaps there is a way to both stabilize and democratize
money. 

The world community could create a form of
monetary reference — belonging and accountable to everyone —
that is not dependent on the economic or political decisions of a
single state or the monetary nationalism of currency-issuing
states. Global commons representatives could collaborate to produce
an international currency, backed by a new kind of reserve
asset, to provide a stable and usable exchange credit for business,
trade and other social transactions.

This new system would generate
a broad measure of common wealth and well-being that is
not based on productivity, profit or interest, but on the perpetual
vitality and continuous adaptation of local resources to support a
good quality of life for all human beings. It would mean turning
the present system of private credit— including banking and finance —
into a commons utility through the conversion of debt to
equity across all sectors of society. It would mean using our commons-
based capital — cultural, social, intellectual, natural, genetic,
and material — as collateral for an equity-based global reserve system
that issues credit underpinned by these resources.

Under this new reserve system, commons assets would form the
basis of a composite standard of value. For example, a Reserve
Basket of Global Common Goods could include indicators for
cultural resources such as indigenous wisdom, household work
and the arts; social resources such as health, literacy, economic
output and income distribution; intellectual resources such as scientific
knowledge, intellectual property and information flows; natural
resources such as air and water quality, ecosystem health and
biological diversity; genetic resources such as living creatures, organs
and seeds; and material resources such as gold, oil, water
and the atmosphere. Rather than convert commons assets into a
market value, these indicators would generate a unique index based
on the sustainability of the global commons and the value that
these common goods have for our natural and social quality of
life and that of future generations. Resource units in this reserve
index would include historically important depletable resources,
and also resources that are currently depletable and are likely to be
depletable in the future. But it would also include resources that
are replenishable and reflect social productivity, human security
and well-being. By continually measuring and averaging the indices
of each resource in this basket, trustees of the commons reserve
system could decide the proportion of those commons
resources that should remain untapped as principal. At the same
time, the commons reserve system would replace the present interest
rate mechanism with a sustainability rate.

THis commons reserve currency would function through the
creation of co-credit—a participatory unit of value used in trading,
investment and decision-making. As co-credits are lost or gained
in each transaction, the deficit or surplus would be accounted with
reference to the sustainability rate — a real-time measure reflecting
the capacity of the global commons to provide and sustain the
well-being of present and future generations. At any given
moment, if the sustainability rate is low, the co-credit is worth less
relative to its value in an exchange, which may cause a buyer to
spend less, or perhaps not spend or to postpone spending; and if
the sustainability rate is higher, the co-credit will be worth more
in the exchange, which may convince the buyer to spend more.
So, through co-credit exchange among buyers and sellers, community
members would determine the value of their own production
based on the capacity of the global commons to support the natural
and social quality of life. Each use of a co-credit (whether the
sustainability rate is low or high) is literally a vote for the longevity,
regeneration and diversity of the planet’s common goods, enabling
human civilization to protect its principal and withdraw from the
commons a smaller portion of its resources. Since the commons
reserve system guarantees a stable and lasting source of global capital,
the development of co-credit exchange would eliminate the
need for banks, financial institutions, government-issued currency,
and a debt-based money system in which the continual payment
of interest on loans requires unsustainable levels of
production and consumption to monetize the existing debt.


==[[Global Common Wealth]]==

Endless economic growth is crashing against the limits of Earth’s
vital systems. In coming years, the recovery of our suppressed
commons as a source of participative governance and non-monetized
value will become critical as the private and public sectors
search for a way out of the current global economic, energy and
ecological crises. 


It’s a challenging puzzle:

* we cannot end the financial crisis without a new monetary system

* we cannot create a new monetary system without creating
long-term incentives for solving the ecological and energy crises

* we cannot create long-term incentives to solve the ecological
and energy crises without a low-carbon system of production
and trade

* we cannot create a low-carbon system of production and trade
without a new multilateral system of governance

* we cannot create a new multilateralism without a total
redefinition of wealth

A New Story of Global Common Wealth is emerging. 

Imagine a world ... where businesses thrive. Governments evolve power upward
to an international trusteeship for the commons, giving up
a portion of their sovereignty through new global standards of cooperation,
trust and shared values. Government authority also
shifts downward to citizens and their commons organizations
through social charters. Local commons trusts organize and affiliate
with each other across the world, providing independent
checks and balances on the power of global corporations, sovereign
governments and multilateral institutions. Global co-governance
creates the means for a systematic redistribution of global
common goods. Cultural and social production preserves resources
and generates new wealth, alongside — but independent
of—the private production of wealth. A commons reserve currency
available through co-credits enables humanity to base its
economic transactions directly on the sustainability and resilience
of the global commons. And world society creates a dynamic equilibrium
between (private) property rights, (public) sovereign
rights, and (commons) sustainability rights through a new multilateral
system of co-governance and co-production, transcending
the dichotomies of state capitalism and transforming life across
the planet."
(http://www.kosmosjournal.org/kjo2/bm~doc/people-sharing-resources.pdf)

=Bio=

"James Bernard Quilligan has been an analyst and administrator in the
field of international development since 1975. He has served as a policy
advisor and writer for many politicians and leaders, including Pierre
Trudeau, Francois Mitterand, Julius Nyerere, Olof Palme, Willy Brandt,
Jimmy Carter and HRH Prince El Hassan."


[[Category:Policy]]

[[Category:Articles]]

[[Category:Commons]]

[[Category:Global Governance]]