2. The OntoShift to the Commons

If commoning has played such a long and prominent role in the history of the human species, why is it generally ignored in modern life? Why does it remain a terra incognita that is routinely mischaracterized and misunderstood? Over the years, as we talked with commoners in countless different contexts, we gradually came to realize that the problem isn’t commoning; it’s the flawed categories of thought used by mainstream economics, law, politics, and policy. Their vocabularies and logics presume a world based on individualism, economic growth, and the human mastery of “nature” (a term that implies a sharp separation of humanity from the nonhuman world). They presume an omnipotent market/state to remake the universe around these mythopoetic ideas. No wonder pockets of successful commoning seem like strange creatures from another planet! 

One day, after pondering this curious mismatch between mainstream thought and the realities we have seen in our research and travels, we needed a break. We decided to stroll through the nearby Beneski Museum of Natural History, at Amherst College. It proved to be a serendipitous detour. While browsing impressive displays of dinosaur skeletons and fossilized footprints, we had a shared epiphany: Sometimes new truths can be revealed only by making a shift in ontological perspective — what we have come to call an OntoShift. We will explain this idea further in a moment, but first, our experience at the museum.

While most natural history museums in major cities have a penchant for the grand and spectacular, the modest, well-appointed Beneski Museum in western Massachusetts is a working space for teaching undergraduates how to make sense of geological mysteries. Many of the exhibits showcase the research of Edward Hitchcock, a leading geologist of the 1830s who discovered thousands of strange marks in rocks at local quarries and farms. At the museum, we saw numerous dinosaur skeletons and bones, including a fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex head, and dozens of slabs of sedimentary rock artfully displayed on the walls. Each set of marks presented a mystery from 270 million years ago. Were they “turkey tracks,” as many locals once called them, or perhaps the footprints of “Noah’s Raven,” a gigantic bird from Noah’s Ark? It was difficult to speculate, because no fossilized bones had been found at the time.1  

For Hitchcock, a serious scientist and devout Christian, the frame of reference for theorizing about this mystery was his own eyes and the Bible. When he encountered deposits of gravel, loam, sand, and boulders on Cape Cod, he found it entirely logical to call them Diluvium, a reference to the great flood described in the Bible. As later scientists concluded, however, the deposits were in fact moraine, the rocky debris left by glaciers during the Ice Age. Even though Hitchcock corresponded with the likes of Robert Owen, Charles Darwin, and Charles Lyell, he remained convinced that the “footmarks” (as he called them), now preserved in sedimentary rock, had been created by large ancient birds. 

And why not? The prehistoric world was only then being discovered. The word “dinosaur” was not coined until 1841 by British geologist Robert Owen, and the first dinosaur fossils in the US were not discovered until 1858. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species was not published until 1859, and some of the most significant fossil discoveries were not made until the 1890s. For the Bible-believing Hitchcock, the idea of enormous lizard-like creatures roaming a very different life-world 273 million years ago was literally unthinkable.

In her 2006 book about Hitchcock, science writer Nancy Pick professed her admiration for his scientific achievements, but ruefully concluded in a fanciful letter to him: “I must tell you that most of your strongest convictions turned out to be mistaken. You were wrong to doubt the existence of an Ice Age. You were wrong to deny the theory of evolution. And, most painful of all, you were wrong about the animals that made your beloved fossil footprints. They were not gigantic ancient birds after all, but dinosaurs.”

It is tempting for posterity to condescend to previous generations because of what they didn’t or couldn’t know at the time. That is not our purpose here. What we find so interesting is the way in which a worldview frames and limits what we see. We can never really see the world “as it is” because our minds are too busy constituting and creating it. We naturally believe that the reality we perceive is self-evident and universal — “common sense” — but, in truth, any view of reality is based on some underlying presuppositions about the nature of the world. Our beliefs are shaped by invisible assumptions affected by culture, history, and personal experience. 

Language is also critical in shaping our consciousness. The language used by a political economy and culture names certain phenomena that they regard as significant and imbues them with a moral content, while leaving other phenomena nameless and ignored. This establishes a mental picture, a frame for perceiving and not perceiving, an insight that politicians have found quite useful. For example, conservatives like to call for “tax relief,” implying that taxes are an unfair affliction and obscuring the truth that “taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”2 In his classic study of “the folklore of capitalism,” Thurman Arnold described how corporations are mischaracterized as persons possessing civil freedoms that would otherwise be denied them. Businesses and other organizations are described “in the language of personally owned private property, when as a matter of fact the things which were described were neither private, nor property, nor personally owned.”3 Cognitive scientists often point to the “ideologically selective character” of frames — a highly effective filter on perception.4  

This helps explain why new truths often hide in plain sight. When John Maynard Keynes was struggling to reinvent economics in the 1930s, he wrote: “The ideas which are here expressed so laboriously are extremely simple and should be obvious. The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”5 Hitchcock tried, but could not escape his inherited worldview. Owen, Darwin, and Lyell also tried (with some trepidation about the explosive theological implications), and for the most part succeeded. Such is the power of a dominant worldview: it invisibly organizes phenomena into a tidy mental frame that suppresses other, potentially important ways to see the world.

In our time, the great problem is not just that the institutions of the liberal state and capitalism are crumbling. It’s that our ways of perceiving and representing the world — the foundational stories that we tell about capitalism — are failing as well. These two problems are intimately connected, of course. Sometimes when political systems no longer work, it’s because they rely on old narratives about existence that no longer work or command respect. Cherished stories and categories of thought fail to recognize that realities have changed. Guardians of the prevailing order generally don’t want to acknowledge other possibilities — and so they cling to archaic language to validate their viewpoints. Sometimes new realities are not recognized because there is simply no vocabulary and logic to make them legible to the culture. Consider how the word “dinosaur” and Darwin’s theory of evolution opened up new ways of seeing, challenging Bible-based perspectives of the world. 

As we tried to explain the phenomena of commoning, we experienced a similar frustration with a deficient discourse. We came to realize that the discourse of conventional politics and economics cannot properly express what we have witnessed. There is a lacuna in the contemporary vocabulary which serves to keep certain realities and insights shrouded in darkness. In the words of historian E. P. Thompson, “It was always a problem to explain the commons with capitalist categories. There was something uncomfortable about them. Their very existence prompted questions about the origin of property and about historical title to land.”6

Our point is that deeper registers of perception matter every bit as much as daily political polemics. Or even more. German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer once pointed out that it is a mistake to believe that one has to talk about politics to change politics. He was right. We need to talk first about our deepest presuppositions about the character of the world. 

The Window Through Which We See the World

The study of the nature of reality and how it is structured — the windows through which we see the world — is called ontology. While we are not eager to plunge into these deep metaphysical waters — the topic can get very complicated and abstruse — a brisk swim is inescapable. One’s basic assumptions about reality determine what is seen as normal and desirable — what is good or bad, what is right or wrong. They amount to the “constitutional framework” of any belief-system, one that directly shapes our ideas of what types of political economy and governance structures are possible. A vision of reality that sees everyone as disconnected individuals, for example, is likely to lead to a social order that privileges individual liberty at the expense of collaborative institutions. A vision of reality that sees everyone as interconnected and dependent on each other and the Earth, opens up very different possibilities. Such a vision also requires different categories of analysis and different metaphors and vocabularies to describe the world.

You could say that one’s ontological premises create different affordances — i.e., capacities and potential uses that have larger political implications. A bicycle creates certain affordances for personal transportation (vigorous exercise, cheap mobility) that are different from those created by an automobile (faster, safer, smoother). Pen and paper offer different affordances for communication (cheap, easy to use) than smartphones (interactive, versatile). So it is with ontologies: they have different affordances for the type of world one can build. When talking about a vision of reality, one must always ask: What does it claim about how individuals relate to each other and to groups? Does it require that things and phenomena embody fixed essences? Is a person’s character fixed and given, or does it change through relationships? How does change occur — through individual agents that cause effects as a machine might, or through complicated, subtle, and long-term interactions among multiple agents in a larger environment? Are any of the phenomena that we observe historically and culturally invariant — i.e., universal  — or are they variable and context-dependent?  

Generally, these sorts of questions about reality are not seen as relevant to the practical, rough-and-tumble world of politics and governance. But given the institutional instability of our times, we believe that nothing is more strategic than to reassess the fundamental ways in which we perceive reality. Such an inquiry might be called onto-political, because our different premises about reality have enormous implications for how we conceptualize the social and political order. If we believe that God exists as an omnipotent force and is the source of truth and meaning in all human affairs, we will construct a societal order that is different from ones in which humans see themselves as entirely on their own, without divine guidance and protection. Because perspectives on reality affect how we build social and political institutions, we cannot just look at the world through a window — as if it were the only self-evident way of perceiving. We need to pause and start to look at the window.7 Margaret Stout, an administrative theorist, puts it simply: “Ontology is important to political theory because it frames presuppositions about all aspects of life and what is good and right.”8 (emphasis in original)  

The OntoStory of the Modern West

The moment is ripe for those of us in the secular West to ponder the general belief system developed during the Renaissance and expanded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the capitalist societies that arose from it. We moderns live within a grand narrative about individual freedom, property, and the state developed by philosophers such as René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. The OntoStory that we tell ourselves sees individuals as the primary agents of a world filled with inert objects that have fixed, essential qualities. (Most notably, we have a habit of referring to “nature” and “humanity,” as if each were an entity separate from the other.) This Western, secular narrative claims that we humans are born with boundless freedom in a prepolitical “state of nature.” But our imagined ancestors (who exactly? when? where?) were allegedly worried about protecting our individual property and liberty, and so they supposedly came together (despite their radical individualism) to forge a “social contract” with each other.9 As the story goes, everyone authorized the establishment of a state to become the guarantor of everyone’s individual liberty and property.10  

Today we are heirs to this creation myth explaining the origins of the liberal, secular state. The story transfers theological notions about omnipotence (God, monarchs) to the sovereign state (presidents, parliaments, courts).11 The Leviathan state acts with sovereign power to privilege individual liberty over all social affiliations or identities based on history, ethnicity, culture, religion, geographic origins, and so on. The primary elements of society are the individual and the state. As one commentator notes, liberalism assumes a human nature “that causes self-interested, atomistic individuals with independent, static preferences to compete in an effort to maximize their own benefits with little or no regard for the implications for others. In this political form, representation is won through competition among sovereign individuals and majority rule.”12    

This story is also the basis for capitalism, which presumes a social order based on individual autonomy and fulfillment to explain why we have market competition and hierarchies. The Nobel laureate economist James Buchanan once identified autonomy, rationality of choice, and the spontaneous coordination of people in the “free market” as the fundamental principles of his discipline.13 In modern times, these presumptions have become ordering principles for much of everyday life. Individual freedom of choice — to choose our favorite TV channels, brand of beer, and political parties — is celebrated, with little thought given to the ways in which the spectrum of choices is determined in the first place.

To probe our presuppositions about the world is not merely an academic exercise. It is immensely consequential in practical ways. Different presuppositions affect how we perceive the world and therefore what types of political systems we regard as realistic and desirable. In a metaphor often used by German physicist Hans-Peter Dürr, fishermen who use nets with a mesh of five centimeters may understandably conclude that there are no fish in the sea smaller than five centimeters. After all, three-centimeter fish never show up in the nets. If you are committed to certain presuppositions about reality, it will be difficult to escape the larger ramifications of your nets of perception. The linkage between ontology and the larger polity and political economy might not be self-evident to ordinary people or policymakers, but the idea is not so complicated. Imagine you build a house and you lay a small, weak foundation. How can the structure possibly last? Or you install a certain number of pillars that can carry, say, ten tons of weight. A few years later you want to add a new floor that would weigh fifteen tons. The house would collapse. Does it really make sense to invest in a heavy addition to the structure if the foundation itself is flawed?

This scenario arguably describes the problem with modern capitalism. It relies on faulty premises about human beings and therefore it can no longer support the grand edifice of the global modern market/state. Its institutional forms are increasingly ineffective, harmful, and distrusted, as seen in the rise of voter alienation and anger in the US and many European countries. When our commitment to “individual freedom” is conflated with the legal “personhood” of globe-spanning corporations, and when climate-changing capital investments are regarded as “private property,” it should not be surprising that the resulting economic system is highly disruptive and literally lethal to the planet. Mainstream critics may attack “capitalism” and “the state,” but they are less prone to inquire into the onto-political premises that undergird their vision of reality. That’s because most of us have internalized those norms. The “prevailing life-motif” of modern capitalism and the liberal state, writes Greek social critic Andreas Karitzis:

promotes the idea that a good life is essentially an individual achievement. Society and nature are just backdrops, a wallpaper for our egos, the contingent context in which our solitary selves will evolve pursuing individual goals. The individual owes nothing to no one, lacks a sense of respect for the previous generations or responsibility to future ones — and indifference is the proper attitude regarding present social problems and conditions.14

The visible pathologies of capitalism — ecological destruction, social precarity, inequality, exclusion, etc. — do not stem only from soulless corporations and cynical politicians. They derive from a deeper, more fundamental problem — a fallacious understanding of reality itself. Facing up to this issue seems to be asking a lot. It’s difficult to truly see the onto-foundations of our socio-economic and political order, let alone do something meaningful to change them. Our cultural norms are subtle, subliminal, and not usually recognized. 

However, there is a way forward: we can begin to cultivate a different, deeper sense of reality by looking closely at the language and metaphors that we use, and the stories we tell. The self-awareness that results, when combined with our actual experiences and practices in commoning, can point the way to a new onto-political order based on different presuppositions. The first step is to recognize the hidden beliefs that shape our perceptions and political culture. We must learn to see that everything is interdependent, and that our individual well-being depends upon collective well-being. Our polity must be “attuned to the relational dimension of life,” as Arturo Escobar puts it.15

OntoStories as a Hidden Deep Dimension of Politics

Many public debates that are ostensibly disagreements about policy or process are, in fact, disagreements about the nature of reality and how it should be. They presume certain human ideal-types and existential realities that frame the dominant discourse. Take the idea of the “self-made man” in capitalist societies. It expresses the cultural fantasy that individuals can truly become successful all by themselves, without help from others. That story then becomes a frame for public discussion. Our presupposition that the Earth is a separate, nonliving thing existing apart from humanity, leads to a perception of land and water as “resources” that can be appropriated and marketized.

The very categories of thought inaugurated by the early modern philosophers established standard ways of thinking that modern societies now regard as self-evident. As men like Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, and John Locke first articulated, the world is supposedly a clash of dualities such as the individual and the collective, humanity and nature, and matter and spirit. The public realm is seen as separate from the private realm. The objective is cast against the subjective. This dualistic habit of thought, as a way of registering reality, leads us to believe that some realms of life are wholly separate and distinct from others, and indeed, diametrically opposed to each other. Modern capitalist societies have built entire cultures around such presuppositions. They reflect what scholars call an OntoStory about reality.

OntoStories can have countless forms that are expressed in many different ways. But at the end of the day they can be classified according to a few traits. There are stories based on the idea that “being simply is” (static) and stories in which existence is a constant becoming (dynamic). In a static world, the present is experienced as a reality that always is and always will be, much as members of the caste system in India regard their world as “just the way things are.” Such a static view of reality is likely to find political expression in theocracy, monarchy, or similar authoritarian rule. In a dynamic world, by contrast, the present reality is always unfolding and becoming something new. 

There are OntoStories predicated on the idea of a single, unitary source of existence, which is likely to find expression in political forms such as socialism and collectivism. Or conversely, stories that posit many sources of existence are more likely to support a political order of modern liberalism and social anarchism. In some OntoStories, truth and meaning come from a transcendent source (God, a king, a pope), and in others from an immanent space of lived experience (the divine within each human or all beings).16  

In any case, OntoStories always reflect a vision of the world and establish the affordances of the system — its structured fields of possibility. The narratives give respectability to certain archetypes of existence and human striving. Human energies are channeled in culturally acceptable ways. The ubiquitous world of advertising and marketing, for example, is not just about selling products; it is about reinforcing an ideal of human satisfaction through individual consumption. It tells an OntoStory about how the world is and should be. Our identity in the world is defined by what we buy or should buy. Nowadays, large corporations are increasingly devising elaborate OntoStories to define reality and thereby advance their political and economic interests. Based on vast quantities of user data, Twitter has devised a classification system of humanity — people who buy cooking supplies, people who live within five miles of a Walmart, etc. —  in order to sell those datasets to advertisers.17 The insurance industry has developed complicated classifications of human disease and injury to determine what medical expenses will be reimbursed. Many courts rely on data analytics about criminals (race, age, neighborhood, income) to predict their likelihood of committing another crime and thereby set “appropriate” jail sentences.18 Such categories of thought reflect a vision of human existence, social behavior, and causality.  

US national security agencies have actually contrived an OntoStory to advance their political interests, as Brian Massumi chillingly describes in his book Ontopower.19 Rather than try to deter or prevent terrorist attacks based on known, provable facts — the historical standard for military intervention — the US Government now declares its own version of time and causation. The asserted possibility of a terrorist threat, as unilaterally determined by security experts, is used to justify lethal state aggression against “terrorists” before anything has happened. Notional threats are defined as provocations. Future possibilities are declared to be actionable facts in the here-and-now. It is a subtle way to redefine time and causation. By spinning a “threat-o-genic” narrative, writes Massumi, the US military redefines reality, seeking to legitimate the state violence and mass surveillance that follows.

These stories help us see the role that ontologies play as a subterranean force in political struggle. Once we accept the idea of the self as an indivisible, bounded unit of autonomous agency, everything else naturally follows: the way we approach the world, the mental frameworks that scientists use to analyze phenomena (“methodological individualism”), the way we act in the world and conceive of leadership, the way we build institutions and policies. One might argue that the most significant field of political contention these days is not taking place in legislatures or courts, but at this level of “reality-definition.” After all, what better way to advance one’s long-term political goals than to propagate a self-serving version of “reality”? It preemptively marginalizes alternative visions of the future while fortifying the existing political and economic order.

Ah, but there is a rub: no ontology, however widely accepted, is guaranteed to work or command respect. An ontology may not persuade or live up to its own claims. Hitchcock’s theory that fossilized footprints were evidence of ancient birds could not credibly explain the discovery of dinosaur fossils. Darwin’s new narrative about evolution could. In similar fashion, today the ontological foundations that undergird capitalism are looking more antiquated than ever. The idea that individuals are born free and sovereign — the cornerstone of the liberal state and “free markets” — has always been something of a fable. But nowadays the credibility of this story is starting to fray as people realize that they inhabit a highly interconnected world. The slow-motion collapse of various ecosystems is also discrediting the idea that humanity stands apart from “nature” and that we are wholly autonomous individuals. 

While countless angry political confrontations around the world are ostensibly about state policies or laws, many such battles are in fact OntoClashes. They reflect profound disagreements about the nature of reality. Clashes between Indigenous peoples and state power are perhaps the most common example. Typically, the nation-state regards some element of nature as a market resource to be exploited — an idea that many Indigenous communities see as a gross violation of their cosmovision. In New Zealand, for example, the Maori have fought the government’s approval of oil drilling in ancestral fishing waters, in violation of the Waitangi treaty with Queen Victoria signed in 1840. In her studies of this conflict, anthropologist Anne Salmond noted that the state and Maori have “fundamentally different onto-logics about human relations with oceans.”20 The state approaches the ocean as a nonliving resource. As such it can be divided up into quantified, bounded units and exploited with an abstract market logic. Oil extraction is perfectly logical to the New Zealand state, whose legal system is constructed to privilege such activity. By contrast, the Maori see the ocean as a living being that has intense, intergenerational bonds with the Maori people. The ocean is imbued with mana, ancestral power, that must be honored with spiritual rituals and customary practices. (If this sounds irrational to you, consider this: such a worldview has worked remarkably well to protect both the oceans and human societies.)

OntoClashes between the nation-state and commoners are obviously not confined to premodern cultures. Geographer Andrea Nightingale has studied Scottish fishermen who object to “rational” fishing policies and practices that regulators seek to impose.21 In crafting catch policies, for example, the state presumes that fishermen are competitive individualists seeking to maximize their personal catch. But the state fails to see the many nonrational subjectivities that define the lives of Scottish fishermen. Working on small fishing vessels in the ocean is dangerous, difficult work, and so fishermen have learned the importance of cooperation and interdependence. Fishermen’s lives are deeply entwined with “community obligations, the need to preserve kinship relationships [with fellow villagers], and an emotive attachment to the sea,” writes Nightingale. State policies presume a very different reality of life and “rationality” than that experienced by fishermen.  

Despite the prevalence of such OntoClashes, modern capitalism and the liberal nation-states remain obsessively committed to their vision of reality. It constitutes a kind of “riverbed”22 of the polity through which everything flows. But increasingly, the state’s OntoStories seem like relics from a different period of human history — a tattered, ill-fitting suit of clothes that is not functional or attractive. It is time to consider the question: how might one imagine and design a different suit of clothes?

The Nested-I and Ubuntu Rationality:
The Relational Ontology of the Commons

The world of commoning represents a profound challenge to capitalism because it is based on a very different ontology. This is not widely appreciated because many people continue to view the commons through archaic ontological perspectives — which is to say, through the normative lens of modern, Western culture. They have internalized the language of separation and methodological individualism. They view objects as having fixed, essential attributes and being disconnected from their origins and context. Commoning has a different orientation to the world because its actions are based on a deep relationality of everything. It is a world of dense interpersonal connections and interdependencies. Actions are not simply matters of direct cause-and-effect between the most proximate, visible actors; they stem from a pulsating web of culture and myriad relationships through which new things emerge. 

For those of us acculturated by Euro-American cultures, it is not so easy to recognize the ontology that underlies the commons. Our very language contains all sorts of hidden biases that point us in different directions and fail to name the webs of relationality. That’s why, in order to truly see the commons, we need to shed inappropriate old concepts and invent new ones. English itself as a dominant world language filters out many insights about commoning that are often better expressed in other languages and cultural experiences.23  

We deal with this issue in greater depth in the next chapter, but for now, we wish to illustrate how basic presuppositions about reality are so powerfully consequential. In trying to communicate the realities of commoning, we kept coming up against the duality of the concepts I and we in English. The very words assert an opposition that commoning transcends. But seeing the world through a binary choice of I or we inhibits a real understanding of commoning. Language itself is a problem in communicating a different OntoStory. As we pondered this quandary, one day a solution occurred to us: the term Nested-I. It is an expression that helps us describe the practices and identity of a commoner. It overcomes the deeply rooted assumptions about individual identity and agency being opposed to collective goals. The Nested-I is an attempt to make visible the subtle, contextual social relationships that integrate “me” and “we.” Even if our Western mindset does not easily acknowledge the idea, that reality is everywhere. 

Nested-I concept

Despite the void in our language, anthropology confirms that we humans are inescapably Nested-I’s. In many non-Western cultures, according to British social anthropology professor Marilyn Strathern, “… the singular person can be imagined as a social microcosm … Indeed, persons are frequently constructed as the plural and composite site of the relationships that produced them.”24 For Strathern, an individual does not achieve autonomy by counterposing his or her self-interests to societal interests, but rather by “celebrating his/her own self-contained sociality.”25 People’s identities are “multiply constituted” through an “enchainment of relations.”26 Or as the poet Walt Whitman famously put it, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the celebrated polymath of Enlightenment culture, regarded his life as a synthesis of myriad relationships:

Everything I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces. Childhood, maturity, and old age all have brought me their thought … their perspectives on life. I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name of Goethe.27

One of the great unexamined truisms of our time — in pointed contrast to Goethe — is that a person can make a fortune through his or her individual efforts and become “self-made.” To think that anyone can truly exist or develop apart from friends, family, colleagues, or society is absurd — a “pliable, pernicious, and irrepressible myth,” as one observer has put it.28 Developmental psychologists will tell you that an individual can only come into being through engagement with others. “It takes a village to raise a child,” as the saying goes. And vice-versa: the collective can only come into being through the contributions and voluntary cooperation of individuals. Anthropologist Thomas Widlok suggests that perhaps we should talk about all of us as having “entangled identities,” “joined lives,” and an “extended self.”29 In other words, individuals and collectives are not incompatible opposites like oil and water. They are conjoined and interdependent. Just as the terms “I” and “we” only have meaning in relation to each other, the very terms individual and collective are relational — they can only convey meaning through one another. Using the term Nested-I helps us get beyond the idea — prevalent in the most respectable intellectual precincts of economics, evolutionary science, biology, and various other social sciences — that the individual is a self-evident category of thought.30

Another term that we came up with to express the relationality of commoning is Ubuntu Rationality. In various Bantu languages in South Africa, the relationship between “me” and “the other” is expressed by the word Ubuntu.31 We use Ubuntu Rationality to refer to a way of thinking that seeks to align individual and collective well-being. The Kenyan Christian religious philosopher and writer John Mbeti translated the word Ubuntu in this way: “I am because we are and, since we are, therefore I am.”32 The individual is part of a “we” — and, in fact, of many “we’s.” The two are deeply intertwined.33

In Western languages, we have no synonym for Ubuntu, but we do have social practices that reflect its spirit. To be sure, there are tensions between the individual and the collective, but if people strive to develop deep, honest relationships and ongoing dialogue, such tensions are minimized and the supposed duality recedes. And we have many reasons to do so: if we reflect on social reality, we can see that Ubuntu is a source of identity and a social safety net. The individual achieves meaning and identity through the social context of communities and society — and society constitutes itself through the flourishing of the individual. 

These ideas have been developed in different contexts by feminist political theorists, ecophilosophers, Indigenous peoples, traditional cultures, theologians, and religious seers. Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet and philosopher, wrote, “Relationship is the fundamental truth of this world of appearance.”34 The central point of philosopher Martin Buber’s classic of existential philosophy, I and Thou, is that life is relational. We find meaning in direct encounters with other living presences, whether with other humans, nature, or God — and we encounter separation when we regard others as objects, expressed as an attitude of I-It.35 Other visionaries have expressed similar ideas in their own ways. Martin Luther King, Jr., argued that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”36 Rachel Carson, in her first major essay, “Undersea,” in 1937, and later in Silent Spring, described life as a profoundly interwoven web.37

In later chapters, we will introduce other terms that name the relational phenomena of commoning more precisely. For now, it is enough to note that philosophers would call our perspective a relational ontology. In a relational ontology, the idea is that relations between entities are more fundamental than the entities themselves. Let this idea sink in. It means that living organisms develop and thrive through their interactions with each other. That is the basis for their identity and biological survival. That is the basis for their aliveness. As a living social organism, a commons embodies a relational ontology that is expressed through recurrent behavioral patterns such as the Ritualizing of Togetherness and Trust in Situated Knowing. Commoners strive to preserve relationships in addressing conflicts and reflect on their peer governance.

While scholars have theorized many different sorts of relational ontologies, they disagree about what specific “relations” between entities actually matter and what they mean. In general, relations are seen as conveying meaning or expressing value — e.g., the relationship between people and a shared symbol, such as a flag, is often associated with collective identity and pride. But there are so many conceivable types of relations that it is impossible to propose a unified philosophical account of relational ontologies. People may have relationships to the land that they cultivate, subjective or spiritual relationships, biological relationships to parents and extended families, circumstantial relationships with friends and work partners, and transient connections to people on the internet, among many others. 

While one could explore many types of relational ontologies, we wish to focus on two general types and highlight how they differ. Each tells us incompatible stories about the nature of being, and each has different political ramifications. One type is called undifferentiated relational ontology. Here, the source of being lies within all living beings as a transcendent force. One can imagine it as a matryoshka, or Russian nesting doll, in which the largest doll encompasses and absorbs all the smaller ones within its embrace. When “the whole” incorporates everything that is “within it,” the pieces might be called “undifferentiated” in that all parts are defined by the whole. No element encompassed by the whole necessarily has its own individual agency or differentiated character. All elements are more or less equal, and are considered so. Politically, such an ontology implies a forced collectivism or a centralized monoculture because every individual and thing is regarded as an undifferentiated part of the whole. 

Differentiated and undifferentiated relational ontology

In contrast, the realities of commoning and a commons-based society can be expressed only by a different ontology, one that recognizes the inherent diversity and differentiation of living systems within the whole. This ontology must allow space for every individual to unfold their unique self. People are born with different talents and desires in different circumstances and upbringings, and everyone faces unique circumstances. A realistic ontology should not attempt to flatten out actual individual differences and reduce them to a universal standard. 

The type of ontology that best describes the realities of commoning is therefore a differentiated relational type in which the source of being arises from all living individuals and manifests in very different, situational ways. At the same time, each living being is connected to others and shares certain elemental aspects of life and consciousness — just as blood flows through all human bodies and yet every human being is unique. In a differentiated ontology, individuals are individuated and yet related to each other and part of a larger whole at the same time. Every living thing is “in a constant state of mutual becoming,” as Margaret Stout puts it, in dynamic engagement with the whole. Since each living element is constantly evolving and affected by multiple influences, the world has no singular definition or representation. We do not live in a “One-World World,” as Arturo Escobar puts it, but rather in a pluriverse. A diversity of life-forms are conjoined by our common humanity and engagement with life on Earth. 

Complexity Science and Commoning

It is tempting to regard this entire discussion as an abstract distraction of little practical value. But let us suggest how a shift towards a relational ontology has created a new paradigm of discovery, complexity science, which is revolutionizing biology, chemistry, evolutionary sciences, physics, economics, and social sciences, among other fields. Complexity science has important things to say about the commons, too, because it sees the world as a dynamic, evolving set of living, integrated systems.38 While individual organisms may have important degrees of agency, they can only be understood in the context of their myriad relationships and constraints by larger structures. The kidney in the human body is not an autonomous unit, for example. It is nested within a larger set of physiological systems within which it must adapt — and the human body in turn must dynamically coexist within a still larger environment. 

By viewing the world through this window — a relational ontology that moves beyond mechanical metaphors and individualism — it becomes possible to offer much better explanations for all sorts of human and ecological phenomena. We can begin to understand a commons as a life-form, not as a “resource,” and as an organic, integrated system, not a collection of discrete parts. The window on reality that a commons expresses is more encompassing and real (in our estimation!) than ontologies that consign relational dynamics to the background as “exogenous variables.”39  

Complexity science offers a more coherent way of explaining how functional design can emerge without a designer. Design happens as adaptive agents (such as commoners) interact with each other. The self-organization of agents — what we call “peer organization” in a commons — gives rise incrementally to complex organizational systems.40 There is no master blueprint or top-down, expert-driven knowledge behind the process. It emerges from agents responding to their own local, bounded circumstances.41 As people experiment, regularize, and refine the ways in which they engage with each other, they find solutions to problems. The kernel of solutions that work well can be described as patterns. A pattern is not a blueprint; it is a template that includes many variations that are similar but not identical. That’s because each variation reflects a particular time, context, set of actors, etc. 

The principles of complex adaptive systems are seen in the self-organization of microbes as they adapt to host organisms, ants as they build their nests, and other living creatures that somehow self-coordinate to generate an overall order for their collective. Biologist Stuart Kauffman, a pioneering theorist of complexity science, has identified key principles of autocatalysis that can occur when one form of matter comes into contact with another.42 Based on experimental insights, he has proposed a theory for the origins of molecular reproduction — a dynamic that others have confirmed in biological metabolisms, chemical networks, and physics, among other realms. The rise of spontaneous order, as it is sometimes called, occurs through the interactions of local agents without any outside supervision or control. It tends to be driven by positive feedback loops within a system that reinforces constructive, order-creating behaviors. Self-ordering and self-healing properties are woven into systems and their constituent elements at a very deep level, making them unusually resilient in the face of disruptions.  

This is obviously a more complicated story than we can delve into here. For our purposes, it is enough to note that the dynamics of self-organization43 can generate a stable, living order within a sea of chaotic, random entropy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics posits that the universe is in a state of constant, increasing entropy that is always moving toward disorder. But according to some novel scientific theories, living organisms — cells, plants, animals (and commons?) — are able to temporarily capture and structure the use of entropic energy flows to sustain life. Aliveness and order spontaneously arise from chaotic disorder. A living organism relies on semi-permeable membranes to allow it to access what is useful in the external environment and filter out what is harmful, all in ways congruent with its particular context.44 “Identity and environment are thus reciprocally defined and determined with respect to each other,” writes biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon, author of Incomplete Nature.45 There is no divine watchmaker or external force imposing order. Rather it emerges through an organism’s internal systems for metabolizing energy and creatively adapting to its environment. The parallels between this biological process and commoning are highly suggestive and worth pondering. 

Conventional scientists scoff at many of these ideas, to be sure, but numerous biologists, chemists, evolutionary scientists, and physicists have embraced complexity theory precisely because it explains things that standard science, operating within a more mechanical, individualist, and agent-based framework, cannot. A relational ontology enables scientists to see  the world in more dynamic, holistic terms. It lets us become more self-aware of the reality that we are personally immersed in living phenomena. While economists have generally resisted this idea (it would shatter too many foundational principles of standard economics!), Kate Raworth, in her brilliant book Doughnut Economics, has proposed a real-world economic framework that recognizes a new ontology — that people are social and relational (not rational and individualistic); that the world is dynamically complex (not mechanical and tending toward equilibrium); and that our economic systems must be regenerative by design.46

The philosopher and biologist Andreas Weber has expressed the view of being that we take in this book: “The world is not populated by singular, autonomous, sovereign beings. It is comprised of a constantly oscillating network of dynamic interactions in which one thing changes through the change of another. The relationship counts, not the substance.”47 Weber’s book Matter and Desire is an extended reflection on this theme, that life on Earth is about “‘reciprocal specification’ — an act of mutual engendering. Only through a moment of encounter does one’s own character come fully to fruition. The world is not an aggregation of things, but rather a symphony of relationships …”48

Making an OntoShift to the Commons

If the world is truly relational, it should be clear the one reason why Garrett Hardin, in his famous “Tragedy of the Commons” essay, could not really see the commons as a viable social system. He could see the world only through the lens of an individualist ontology. Living within this framework, he literally could not comprehend commoning or imagine a set of political affordances based on dynamic relationships.

So to truly understand the dynamics of the commons, one must first escape the onto-political framework of the modern West. One must make what we call an “OntoShift” — a recognition that relational categories of thought and experience are primary. This is not merely about looking at interactions among independent individuals. It is about intra-actions, a term used by physicist and philosopher Karen Barad to describe how relationships themselves are a force of change, transformation, and emergence. As one Barad commentator puts it: “When bodies intra-act, they do so in co-constitutive ways. Individuals materialize through intra-actions, and the ability to act emerges from within the relationship, not outside of it.”49 Seen from this perspective, relational categories are not simply cause-and-effect interactions among independent objects, such as billiard balls bouncing around a pool table. They are interactions that engage the inner dimensions of living organisms, and in this way generate change and value. Furthermore, there is no single, essentialist individual, but rather many dynamic “I’s,” each of which is implicated in many communities and thus a part of “many we’s.” 

You might ask yourself, how can these ideas actually work? For people accustomed to thinking in an individualist ontology and in dualities, it’s a big challenge to see the world as relational. It requires developing a different sense of reality. No one can simply announce that he/she is adopting a new perspective. A new orientation must be learned and practiced. Saying goodbye to old habits of thought requires practice. Like giving up smoking, it requires willpower, attention, and the deliberate learning of new habits. That’s what the next several chapters are meant to do for those who want to “think like a commoner” and make an OntoShift. 

OntoSeed at center of galaxy of commoning practices.

So far, we have cast a foundation for a different understanding of reality. In the remainder of the book, we supply the materials for constructing the house. The new structure can help us envision different sorts of community, social practices, and economic institutions — and above all, a new culture that honors cooperation and sharing.

The first step in this journey is language. We must reflect on how the words and logic of our everyday language convey old habits of thinking and limit our sense of what is possible. So let us train ourselves to see the world in a new way through new words, relationships, and social practices. 

3. Language and the Creation of Commons

Pencil, nail and paper

If you ask someone who speaks English which two of the three items above belong together, most will say the pencil and paper. But ask someone who speaks Bora, a language from the Northwest Amazonian region, and you will get a different answer. Bora speakers have “… around seventy terms for the shape of things: One for long and thin things, another for round things, and yet another for flat things with a straight edge, and so on.”1 When ethnolinguist Frank Seifart conducted a “relating-things” empirical test with Bora speakers and compared their results to those of English and Spanish speakers, he found that Bora speakers in one hundred percent of the cases answered that “pencil and nail” belonged together. To them, the relationship among things that are similar in shape seemed self-evident. 

As this small experiment suggests, language profoundly shapes perception. Words, terms, and categories of thought isolate and emphasize only certain aspects of reality. They determine what we notice about a given phenomenon or thing — and marginalize other aspects. Terms and especially analytical categories point us to what “really matters,” according to a certain cultural outlook or theory. They subtly direct how we perceive the world. If the words in a given language focus on shapes over function, then no wonder the speakers of that language prefer to group things according to their shape rather than their function.

So, even if we like to believe that our everyday language faithfully expresses the actual realities we experience, this is simply not the case. We not only inhabit distinct worlds; we not only describe our worlds in different idioms; consciously or unconsciously, we inhabit and create distinct worldviews through language. “Pencil and paper” may seem automatically to go together, but as any anthropologist will testify, the social order that we inherit or construct for ourselves is quite artificial.

Our words, terms, and idioms subtly determine what we see as pertinent and what logical relations matter. The absence of words and terms indirectly signals what we regard as unimportant — after all, we have declined to name it. In sum, we may think that the meanings of our words are self-evident and our way of life is normal, but in fact both are highly circumstantial and context-based. Consider how the simple hand gesture of an upturned palm with fingertips joined together means different things in different cultures: Egyptians use the gesture to say, “Be patient!” Italians use it to ask, “What exactly do you mean?” And Greeks are exclaiming, “That’s just perfect!”2 Again, the reality we each inhabit may feel solid and self-evident, but in fact, our symbols of meaning that we ultimately use — be they gestures or words — are somewhat arbitrary. 

Three gesturing hands

We ended the last chapter by noting that seeing the commons as a general paradigm requires that we learn a new orientation toward reality — an OntoShift. In this chapter, we want to explain why this orientation can only be expressed through new sorts of language. 

In the course of writing this book, we often felt the desperate need for terms that more adequately describe the realities of the commons. For example, we found that the term “resource” as used by economists and policymakers implies a certain type of social relationship — impersonal, instrumental, market-oriented — that doesn’t really apply in a commons. We found that the duality of “private” and “public,” which implies a world divided into markets and the state, fails to acknowledge the distinct realities of the commons. On countless occasions, we found ourselves imprisoned by the language of mainstream culture and frustrated by the absence of words, terms, and relational categories that could give voice to the commons. We came to realize that if we aspire to social and political transformation but try to do so using the language of market economics, state power, and political liberalism, we will fail. Somehow we had to escape the powerful gravitational pull of old paradigm language and come up with words that name a different order of social reality! Relationships and ways of being and doing that are barely visible in the general culture have to be made explicit through language.

The Tenacity of Systems of Opinion;
The Harmony of Illusions

Throughout history, problems have arisen when the language used to represent reality, fails to meet the needs and aspirations of people. An old framework of thought fails when it cannot properly name phenomena that people need to see to collectively manage their affairs. This is not just a matter of accurate analysis and representation; it is also a matter of conveying values, feelings, and relationships. In Chapter 2, we saw how Edward Hitchcock was unable to formulate and assert new facts because he was so immersed in a Biblical worldview. Nor did he have the terminologies to imagine and interpret a prehistoric world of dinosaurs. Others such as Darwin and Lyell did. They reinterpreted reality by providing new terminologies, providing a durable cognitive scaffolding for future generations. This is a recurrent experience in the history of science: the iconoclast who breaks the hammerlock of a conventional framework of understanding by offering a different one that — despite its novelty — is nonetheless recognized by enough people as more explanatory and “true.”

In his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn famously described the way that old frameworks of thought crumble in the face of new interpretations and ideas. He argued that breakthrough discoveries in science tend to arrive when upstarts challenge an underlying framework of rules and assumptions. They supplant a constellation of group commitments about how to interpret the world, and offer new assumptions, rules, and explanations. This paves the way towards a paradigm shift.3 While the idea of a paradigm shift is open to wide interpretation and has become a bit of a cliché, our sense of it is described in Chapter 2 as an OntoShift. A real paradigm shift occurs when our fundamental presuppositions about reality change. The challenge that political changemakers rarely address is how to step outside of entrenched worldviews and question unexamined assumptions built into our cognition.

Ludwik Fleck — a Polish microbiologist and philosopher of science who in 1935 prefigured Kuhn with an even more radical approach — noted the inherent conservatism of “thought collectives.” Fleck wrote: “When a conception permeates a thought collective strongly enough, so that it penetrates as far as everyday life and idiom and has become a viewpoint in the literal sense of the word, any contradiction appears unthinkable and unimaginable.”4 Fleck recalled how Columbus’s idea that the world was round was too crazy for people to imagine. Who could believe that people on the other side of the world walked around on their heads, with their legs in the air? 

A thought collective acts like the immune system of a body, relentlessly prowling the world for viruses and other threats to the received wisdom while authorizing access by entities deemed to be “friendly outsiders.” “What does not fit into the system remains unseen,” wrote Fleck. “Alternatively, if it is noticed, either it is kept secret, or laborious efforts are made to explain an exception in terms that do not contradict the system.”5 Of course, some thought collectives are far more closed and fearful than others. Some have designs and methodologies that are closed and hostile to change; others are structurally more open to heterodox opinion, dissent, evolutionary change, and methodologies that allow for integrating different ways of knowing. Galileo faced a buzz saw of religious denial when he questioned Copernicus’s view of the cosmos with the Earth at its center. But eventually, the new paradigm overcame the counterclaims of orbital “epicycles” that sought to preserve the Copernican system. The tendency to interpret phenomena in ways that affirm one’s own priorities — confirmation bias —
is all part of what Fleck called “the tenacity of systems of opinion and the harmony of illusions.”6 The prevailing order must be defended, insurgent views rebutted, and dissenters denigrated or even persecuted. 

The arrival of a new paradigm is usually announced by new categories of thought, new terms, and new words that illuminate neglected or unimagined dimensions of reality, making them available to the culture. The idea that even empirical facts are relative, that worldviews and cultural frames are contingent, is a difficult pill for enlightened moderns to swallow. And this is why a closer look at language discloses how our sense of reality, as mediated through language, is filled with artificial markers of meaning. Remember the paper-pencil-nail example above.

Any society is likely to have a dominant framework of perception and meaning. This is surely one reason why humanity has succeeded so well as a species. While an individual can acquire only tiny fragments of a culture’s vast storehouse of knowledge, consensus frameworks can enable indirect access to a society’s collective knowledge. The cognitive framework amounts to a kind of operating system of the body/mind, with both strengths and limitations. It preordains only certain affordances of permissible perception and thought, some of which are aggressively reinforced by powerful institutions and leaders. When the methodologies and convictions of one thought collective become suffocating or harmful, the question arises: how can a new “thought style” be introduced to challenge and supplant the old one? We believe a vital strategy, though  certainly not the only one, is the use of a new language with fresh, more spacious affordances.

Language and World-Making

We’ve seen how language is an indispensable force for imagining the world — and for socially constructing what counts as a fact. It is even more: language is a means for co-creating the world. It has only been in the past two hundred years, for example, that land and certain forms of human work have been regarded as “capital”7 — a term of rather central importance to modern history. A whole vocabulary of economics has made the social relations of capitalism more real and normative than primary experience. As capitalists have sought greater productivity from their property, terms such as “human capital” and “natural capital” have been adopted to express relations toward people and nature. Similarly, the internet and digital culture have given rise to entirely new vocabularies to describe the salient realities of online life – “spam,” “phishing,” “flame wars,” emoticons, and acronyms like LOL. Bora speakers in the Northwest Amazon have developed their own highly specific terms to name what matters to them and to navigate through their social and physical terrain. The same with the Jahai people in the untouched rainforests of northern Malaysia, who have a dozen different words for odors that permeate their landscape: one for the smell of boiled onions, another for the aroma of meats, others for burnt rubber and “blood that attracts tigers.”8 Speakers of English or German don’t have much need for such concepts, which is why it takes an elaborate analogy (“smell of boiled onions”) simply to make a rough translation. 

In his book Landmarks, nature writer Robert Macfarlane compiled hundreds of words that local communities have invented to name distinctive aspects of their local landscapes. On the Isle of Lewis in Ireland, for example, the word èit names the “practice of placing quartz stones in moorland streams so that they would sparkle in the moonlight and thereby attract salmon to them in the late summer and autumn.”9 In Hertfordshire, England, prehistoric arrowheads are known as fairy darts. In the Cotswolds, decayed wood is called droxy.10 The countless words used by hyperlocal populations have a “compressive precision” and the capacity to make “ultra-fine discriminations,” writes Macfarlane.11 For centuries, these vocabularies “have spilled their poetry into everyday life. They have anthologized local history, anecdote, and myth, binding story to place. They have been functional — operating as territory markers and ownership designators” — helping people to name landmarks, navigate the landscape, and connect to their ancestors’ history. The words function as “memory maps.” As Alec Finlay puts it, the world is “lit by the mnemonics of words.”12 

A prominent ethnographer of landscape and language, Keith Basso, noted that the Apache people of western Arizona regard their special words as much more than referents. They are ways to express themselves aesthetically, ethically, and musically. They offer powerful ways to connect people to their own geographies, cultures, and histories. In our time, marketers have used the expressive power of words to advance their sales and brand identities, to the extent of buying “naming rights” for sports arenas and urban landmarks, for example.13 When commoners replace commodified place names and branded culture with their own nomenclatures, they restore the expressive power of language and re-enchant the commons. The culture itself becomes a commons because the words resonate in people’s hearts and experience; they are not just marketing totems that a wealthy corporation has paid for. 

Given this role of language, the accelerating extinction of languages as the monoculture of global capitalism intensifies is troubling. Biolinguistic diversity has enabled humans to understand the nonhuman world in discerning, insightful ways. Now that crucial element of human culture is being lost. Most of Australia’s 250 aboriginal languages have vanished, depriving humankind of some of our ability to imagine and name different possible human relationships to nature.14 “Without a name made in our mouths, an animal or a place struggles to find purchase in our minds and in our hearts,” as one ethnographer put it.15

Frames, Metaphors, and the Terms of Our Cognition

As these examples suggest, some of the most important ways of world-making go through language. Language is not only powerful as a tool by which we communicate and coordinate with each other. It organizes our cognition and self-awareness. Language is our most important vehicle for expressing shared concepts and asserting what we consider relevant; it is, thus, essential for creating culture. The question is, what concepts, facts, and perspectives shall we declare to be relevant? What type of shared knowledge and culture do we want to propagate?

This question brings us to the importance of frames and metaphors. As sociolinguist George Lakoff has written in his many books, the frames embedded in our language literally enact our cognition.16 With self-congratulation, the corporate world refers to itself as “job creators,” celebrating its power while marginalizing the actual work that real people do. Retailers like to frame the act of spending money on sales items as “saving money” because one is supposedly paying less than the regular price. The point of frames and metaphors is to preprogram our field of vision and subtly instill emotional meanings and values in our perceptions and thoughts. Framing predetermines the answers that can be given to questions by presuming what is important and permissible to ask in the first place. Because frames powerfully transmit the ontologies upon which they are based, we hardly notice how they silently infiltrate our brains. Even if we negate the prevailing discourse (“capitalism sucks”), we still enact it unconsciously through our semantic structures and terms. Frames in this way shape policies. In fact, they are policies.

To a great extent, framing works through metaphors that function at neural levels. We end up internalizing the ideas of frames in our minds as normal. It makes a difference if we imagine and talk about ourselves as “reverent guests of nature” (as in the Taoist tradition) or as “conquerors of nature” (as in the modern Western tradition).17 Metaphors often have powerful moral associations that affect how we position ourselves toward a given topic. For example, economist Joseph Schumpeter’s metaphor that capitalism is all about “creative destruction” has been used to valorize “innovation” as something fresh, modern, and progressive —
not stodgy and backward-looking.18 The word carries an implicit judgment and moral accounting. Taken together, the metaphors and frames of our language weave a web of cultural associations and attitudes. In a market culture, it’s no wonder that the prevailing frames and metaphors fail to capture the realities of commons and commoning!

Paradigms and their assumptions, metaphors and the frames they create, categories and the terms that explain them — these ingredients all come together to express a “thought style,” as Fleck calls it. A standard approach to perceiving the world produces “a readiness for stylized (that is, directed and restricted) perception and action, until an answer becomes largely pre-formed in the question, and a decision is confined merely to ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ or perhaps to a numerical determination, until methods and apparatus automatically carry out the greatest part of our mental work for us.”19 (emphasis in original) Answers are correct only insofar as the thought collective regards the discourse itself as permissible and true. To stay within the boundaries of the thought collective, most commentary and research amounts to elaborating on fundamental premises. Ideas that defy the prevailing thought collective (such as the commons and commoning) do not compute. They are avoided, rejected, and denied. Their proponents are ignored and sometimes persecuted.

Many things can be done to surmount restrictive thought frames and inaugurate new ones that can supplant them. First, one must deconstruct the dominant frames and metaphors of the dominant discourse —
along with their implicit logic, values, and emotional associations. The whole chain of ontology, frame, and terms must be eliminated root and branch, and replaced — a task that obviously can only occur over time, and not in one fell swoop. This is necessary because using the same frames, concepts, and metaphors as previously will simply revivify the old worldview that we are trying to transcend. For example, the normative language about work as something that you do at a (paid) job conjures up the entire worldview that people must earn money through their commodified labor in order to survive and develop in the world. An entire worldview and social system are embedded in our everyday language and internalized in how we interpret social reality.

We therefore need to become not only more self-aware of the concepts and terms that re-entrench the existing order of thought. We also need to teach ourselves new vocabularies that point to more liberating ways of being. We need to learn a language that will help us make an OntoShift and think in relational terms about a new world that is possible. To sensitize us to the loaded words in our daily lexicon, we offer a collection of Keywords of a Fading Era, including a selection of Misleading Binaries. To help us learn to name, see, and understand commoning more clearly, we also offer a Glossary of Commons-Friendly Terms. You may wish to browse through these glossaries and come back to them later. 

Language Evokes and Sustains a Worldview

This is our attempt to identify terms whose embedded meanings point in the wrong direction. They subtly direct our attention to old-paradigm ways of perceiving and thinking while blocking more constructive forms of cognition and communication. Many utterly familiar terms in modern societies evoke realities that are actually breaking down and decaying. We might call them keywords from a fading era — oncesalient terms that are increasingly stale and archaic. 

Why do we need such a glossary? John Patrick Leary, a cultural historian of capitalism and its language, explains that the keywords we use reveal a lot about the logic, values, and sensibilities of a people. They “bind together ways of seeing culture and society,” he notes. Citing Raymond Willliams’s classic book on keywords from 1976,20 Leary states that the words that command our attention today “relate to affinity for hierarchy and a celebration of the virtues of competition, ‘the marketplace,’ and the virtual technologies of our time.”21

This is exactly what we experienced in writing these pages. We faced a special challenge: trying to communicate the subtle realities of commons and commoning with words whose meanings are deeply embedded in a different, market-focused culture. There was no way! The words themselves are perfectly fine, but we always felt that they could not really express certain truths about commons. Many terms are slyly misleading simply because they suggest solid, trustworthy ideas, while in fact the referents are disappearing realities. The words are becoming empty husks. Think about the word sustainability. Today it is used to describe business models rather than the mindful use of shared natural wealth to ensure its capacity for regeneration. Certain terms signal one’s belief in a worldview that is problematic. When talking about human capital, you endorse a world in which the primary role of human beings is to be resources for the labor market. When you talk about economic growth, you invite listeners to believe in the faux-egalitarian narrative that growth raises all boats even though the reality is quite different. 

In this sense vocabulary is a living universe of meaning communicated through discrete words; it is not a mere classification system such as a taxonomy. Vocabulary is often described as a “field of words with explanations” (vocabularium in Latin). A look at how vocabularies actually function reveals that they are more like open, evolving collections of words and terms that reflect a hidden web of logic and relationships. A consistent, shared vocabulary illuminates the multifold relationships between words and helps us share experiences and knowledge with others. (That is the reason for these glossaries!)

Keywords from a Fading Era

Citizen, also called “a national,” identifies a person in relation to the nation-state and implies that this is a person’s primary political role. The term “citizen” is often used to imply that noncitizens are somehow less than equal peers or perhaps even “illegal.”22 A more universal term is Commoner. 

Development is a term of political economy used by the US and European nations to prod “undeveloped” countries to embrace global commerce, resource extractivism, and consumerism along with improvements in infrastructure, education, and healthcare. The harmful side-effects of “development” typically include ecological destruction, inequality, political repression, and cultural dispossession. German ecologist Wolfgang Sachs has called development a mindset that puts the political economies of all nations on a single track: “The lead-runners show the way; they are at the forefront of social evolution, indicating a common destination even for countries which had highly diverse trajectories in the past. Many different histories merge into one ‘master history,’ many different time scales merge into one master time scale. The imagined time is linear, only allowing for progressing or regressing.”23  

Governance refers to multiple arrangements of guiding and controlling human behavior. Like the term government, it derives ultimately from the Greek kubernaein [κυβερνάω], which literally means to steer. The question is: Who steers whom and by which techniques? The term, as re-minted by economists and political scientists since the early 1990s, implies that a separate class, power group, or institutional apparatus stands over others and governs them — in other words, that the government and governed are separate. The term governance in its standard usage does not encompass the idea of collective coordination and control by people themselves. Our provisional alternative to the term governance is Peer Governance.

Incentives describe the use of something, usually money, to motivate people and to direct their actions in a desired way. In the context of a system of rewards, incentives are usually meant to encourage harder work. (No wonder it was popularized in 1943 in the context of the US war economy.) While external incentives surely have a role to play, studies find that money and other incentives often crowd out instinctual motivations to create and contribute. The introduction of money in a setting signals that impersonal, self-serving social protocols are the norm, which in turn deters people from Contributing Freely. “[M]oney is extraordinarily unfit for addressing needs with Care,” writes Miki Kashtan.24

Innovation refers to ideas, tools, or devices that are new, and, by implication, more original, beneficial, progressive, and effective than that which already exists. The so-called disruptive force of innovation on society and markets is celebrated even through the change is often of negligible value, antisocial, or ecologically harmful. In the end, “innovation” is seen as an engine for competitive market advantage and return on capital investment. Hence the positive aura of the word, especially when it is cast against its binary opposite, “static, traditional, and old,” which implies a lack of imagination. The alternative to “innovation” is not this binary opposite, however, but creative adaptation to ever-changing needs in ways that are shared and convivial.

Leadership is a term that implies a single leader — bold, courageous, insightful — who mobilizes followers to achieve collective goals that might otherwise be unattainable. There is no question that some individuals are inspiring and catalytic. But understanding “leadership” as it happens in most organizational contexts switches on and validates a hierarchical structure in our minds. Leadership is then associated with gaining power over processes and people. It obscures the potential of commoning to actualize change and organize our lives — or, as Miki Kashtan puts it, “to inhabit an intentionality of leadership without having power.”25 Catalytic change can be achieved through processes of distributed power and shared purpose, as seen in Sociocracy,26 the holacracy approach,27 Theory U.,28 and Peer Governance practices.

Nonprofit implies that an organization is virtuous and socially minded — presumably the opposite of a self-interested for-profit corporation. But a nonprofit is primarily a legal status for organizations that grants them certain tax exemptions. The term nonprofit is somewhat misleading because it suggests that there is a way to participate in a capitalist economy in socially minded ways without making a profit; it is more accurate to say that nonprofits are reinvesting profits into social purposes. They ultimately depend, directly or indirectly, upon profit-making from the larger economy and do not offer structural emancipation from the imperatives of capitalism itself.

Organization usually refers to an institution or association whose members coordinate with each other to pursue shared goals and speak with one voice. This meaning is now being subverted by the power of open networks, which is rendering the idea of a stable organization with identifiable participants and boundaries archaic. Conventional organizations such as government and Corporations are discovering that as the boundaries around organizations become more porous, collaborations with “outsiders” are becoming more routine, and interactions more fluid and dynamic. Interestingly, the term organization stems from Greek órganon [ὄργανον], which translates as a tool to “compose into a viable, vital whole,” as our body organs do. Rather than focusing on organizations as a form, we find it more useful to focus on the quality of organizing within an institution: conscious self-organization, networking, and Peer Governance.

Corporations are forms of Organizations that business scholar Ronald Coase famously argued were a more efficient solution to high transaction costs. This analysis is now being subverted by sharing on open platforms and in Commons, which enable people to minimize transaction costs through collaborations within communities of trust. Flexible improvisation through Commoning can begin to compete with corporate structures and markets, although this approach usually suffers from inadequate infrastructure and financing.

Participation is a term often used to describe Citizen involvement in government, community life, and organizations. Today the term is usually invoked in a positive way to imply that citizen participation (in hearings, decision-making, or participatory budgeting programs) fulfills democratic ideals and confers popular legitimacy on the outcomes. This is precisely the deficiency of the term “participation,” however: it is often confined within a predetermined, top-down set of policy options and implementation strategies. The public does not really initiate and show sovereign political agency in a fuller sense. It merely “participates” in public debates and processes on terms that politicians, regulators, and other state officials have already found acceptable, giving the ultimate decisions a veneer of legitimacy. By contrast, Commoning is a more robust, independent act of political agency.

(To) scale: “How do we scale [up] this idea?” is often another way of asking how to make it significant or consequential. The term implies some sort of verticality (bottom-up, top-down), as if centralized hierarchies were needed to expand the operationality of an idea or practice. But as we explain in our term Emulate & Then Federate (pp. 202–203), local projects can expand through voluntary participation, peer organization, and federation, without the ministrations of centralized systems of control. Enabling infrastructure is often helpful, but projects taken to scale invariably generate new complications and fixed overhead expenses while reducing the possibility of elegant solutions, local flexibility, and human judgment.29 At a certain point, large-scale systems require increasing energy supplies and workloads to keep them running (“regrettable necessities,” as David Fleming calls them), which can siphon away resources for meeting real needs. Large scale is fundamentally disempowering: “It is like a wave: you can ride it, but not steer it,” notes Fleming.30 The wisdom of designer Thomas Lommée is apt: “The next big thing will be a lot of small things.”31

Scarcity in its popular understanding points to insufficiency that can be solved by the market economy through invention, Innovation, and economic growth. The “scarcity” of oil, land, and water may seem self-evident, but, in fact, the term does not reflect any inherent property of a resource. Oil, land, or water are merely finite. The term scarcity reflects the worldview of a social system that uses a resource. Something is regarded as “scarce” if there is not enough supply to meet actual or potential demand. Within a capitalist context, scarcity is even created when there is plenty of supply, as in the case of knowledge, software code, and information. That is the precise purpose of copyright and patent law — to prevent knowledge and creative works from being shared. “If we experience scarcity,” writes Alan Rosenblith, “the problem is with our systems, not the universe.”32 The Bushmen of the Kalahari in Africa  experience “affluence without abundance,” as the title of a book about them puts it.33 Dealing with limited resources is one of the core challenges a Commons faces. For finite resources such as land, this challenge usually happens through a Cap approach that establishes limits on the use of shared wealth. The manufactured scarcity of software code is addressed through free, libre, and open source software [FLOSS] communities. 

Pluralism is often taken as social virtue because of its claims to tolerate and accept different races, ethnicities, genders, religions, etc. But pluralism within a liberal market state has normative expectations about social aspirations and attitudes toward capitalism and Governance. For example, when individuals climb within the corporate world it is seen as proof of racial and feminist emancipation. This is very different than welcoming a Pluriverse, which implies a recognition of multiple ways of being in the world. Pluralism is important so far as it goes, but it generally means that “diversity” must fundamentally accept the idea of a “One-World World,” as anthropologist Arturo Escobar puts it.34

Misleading Binaries

When using binary, or polar, opposites, a person implies that each pole exhibits a very different logic from the other and that each is essentially incompatible. But the experience of commoning in a given situation dissolves or transcends many presumed binaries. For example, people who participate in a collaborative endeavor such as a blood donation system or an academic discipline may have the experience of being a Nested-I, which transcends the polarity of the individual and collective. As we enter the world of the Commons, therefore, we begin to leave the world of “misleading binaries.” Here are a few of them.

Collective/Individual. This binary is often used to suggest that the interest of an individual is positioned against the interests of a collective body. Such conflicts can exist, to be sure, and can be addressed in their contexts. Problems arise, however, when the idea of “I” is pitted against the “we” (or “I” is asserted in denial of “we”). The individual is considered utterly separate and distinct from others — for example, the “self-made man.” This is an illusion because an individual can develop talents and identity only through his/her participation in a larger collective. And vice-versa: the collective can only come into being through individuals. In other words, the two are conjoined and interdependent, not polar opposites and separate. We try to underscore this idea through the idea of the Nested-I and Ubuntu Rationality.

Cooperation/Competition. These two terms are often posed as opposites. But evolutionary scientists and anthropologists note that they are often quite interrelated: species tend to have symbiotic relationships that entail both competition and cooperation, depending upon the circumstances. Even economists have noted such dynamics in various market settings as people and businesses simultaneously compete and cooperate. On assembly lines, workers routinely share their tools and help each other. It is therefore misleading to state or imply that “competition is bad, and cooperation is good.” They both happen everywhere, all the time. The real question is whether the fruits of cooperation can accrue to the cooperators, or whether they will be primarily captured by investors and Corporations, as in the so-called sharing economy.

Consumer/Producer. Standard economics generally sees consumers and producers as a dyad relationship: a business produces, an individual consumes. But as commons and open networks empower people to self-provision (individually and collectively), the duality of these two functions is blurring. Some observers have tried to acknowledge this fact by talking about “prosumers” who blend production and consumption in one process. This coinage has its value, but it still places the discussion on an economic, materialistic plane — production and consumption of goods through resource extraction, modification, and distribution. 

Objective/Subjective. In modern life, these two modes of perception and understanding are taken as opposites. The “objective” is seen as physical, verifiable, and measurable, whereas the “subjective” is given a lesser status as merely one person’s feelings, mood, and intuition, and therefore less real and true. Objectivity points to hard, immutable facts that are “scientific” while subjectivity is seen as unreliable and transient. However, neurologists, behavioral scientists, and economists have shown that the separation between objective and subjective is largely a fiction because it assumes that rationality is only cognitive and conscious — and that subjectivity is by definition irrational. In reality, the objective and subjective are utterly integrated. Non-cognitive, embodied insights and feelings can also be quite reliable and true.

Rational/Irrational. A variant of the “objective” vs. “subjective” divide noted above. The “rational” is supposedly objective, while the “irrational” is merely personal and subjective. The presumption is that non-rational modes of understanding (i.e., qualitative, emotional, spiritual, intuitive) are not to be trusted. Indeed, the irrational has been associated with women and girls, and considered more appropriate to private spheres of life (family, personal relationships) whereas the rational is associated with public life (and men and boys). This elemental distinction is often the foundation for institutions that claim to be making rational decisions by ignoring non-scientific, non-quantifiable factors and feelings.

Public/Private. This familiar binary reflects the premise of modern industrial societies that government and markets are separate and somewhat oppositional. The government is supposedly the force for “public,” collective purposes, and the market is supposedly a realm of “private” choice and freedom (even though free marketers deftly reposition “private choices” as the engine of public purpose, the so-called Invisible Hand). This framing is largely a fiction. Contemporary politics has demonstrated just how closely intertwined state power and capitalist markets truly are. Any disagreements between the public and private sectors pale in comparison to their strong mutual commitments to each other, their allegiance to a worldview based on market capitalism, and the market economy’s structural dependence on public financing, civil infrastructure, regulatory oversight, and so on. Political debates that revolve around an opposition between “public” and “private” rely on a shallow, specious framing that fails to acknowledge commons and other noncapitalist forms of order.

Self-interest/Altruism. The presumption that a person’s behavior is either self-interested or altruistic reflects another aspect of the deeply rooted idea that people are essentially “Isolated-I’s” separate from larger social collectives. In a world of Isolated-I’s, it is functional to a certain extent to make calculated, rational choices. But the binary of self-interest and altruism is specious when one considers that self-care is a prerequisite for care of others and vice-versa. Self-interest and altruism are in fact blended. Showing great concern for others is also a way to advance one’s own interests; caring for one’s self develops an identity that enables one to care for others. The binary of self-interest and altruism dissolves.

Glossary of Commons-Friendly Terms

Beating the Bounds describes the process by which Commoners monitor the boundaries of their commons to protect against enclosure while celebrating their identity as a community. The term derives from an ancient English custom in which members of a community, old and young, walked the boundaries of their Commons to familiarize everyone with their land, and destroy any hedges or fences enclosing it. The perambulation was often followed by a feast.

Capping means setting an absolute limit to determine how much people can take from finite and depletable wealth such as land, timber, and water. Setting a cap alerts people that they may not take as much as they want, which helps avoid harm to the wealth of nature upon which a group depends. Capping was used in medieval English Commons (Stints) as well as in contemporary global governance (the “cap-and-share” proposal as outlined in Sky Trust).39 

Care is a disposition and empathetic engagement that manifests in how someone undertakes an activity, including economic ones. Care also describes elemental human activities that signify an awareness of interdependency, neediness, and relatedness as basic human conditions [See Nested-I and Ubuntu Rationality]. It can be seen in raising children, nursing family members and friends, peer governance and provisioning, stewarding nature, and working for the common good, among other activities. The term, which has a long history in feminist studies, recognizes the importance of decommodified work and intrinsic value, which are generally ignored or undervalued by market culture. Care is sometimes incorrectly conflated with “care jobs,” which in market contexts emphasize productivity over genuine human care. In fact, care involves a generous spending of time whereas care jobs tend to apply a time-saving logic for economic reasons.

Care-Wealth. When people take care of forests, farmland, water, or urban spaces, these become part of their shared memory, culture, social lives, and identities. Thus when Commoners provision for themselves and interact with the world with their whole being, they are enacting a different cosmovision. They do not produce goods or commodities as rational individuals, in the manner that economists would describe. They become stewards of care-wealth — things, living systems, and relationships that are the focus of affection, care, shared experiences, and emotional attachments. The term resource invites us to regard shared wealth as something to be used, extracted, and turned into an element of an economic calculation. Care-wealth consists of affective relations with one’s everyday life and culture.  

Collaborative Finance describes ways of financing Commons and providing structural support for Commoning while shielding these activities from the harmful influences of money and debt. A primary goal is to decommodify relationships among people and with the nonhuman world. Collaborative finance uses money and credit in such a way that commons institutions are strengthened and people feel secure and free as they become less dependent on markets. Important aspects of collaborative finance include Money-Lite Commoning, Peer-to-Peer credits, a Gentle Reciprocity in the use of money, and new Public/Commons Circuits of Finance. Historically, collaborative finance has included such models as mutual credit societies and insurance pools, cooperative finance, community-controlled microfinance, and local currencies. [See Crowdfunding]

Commons – Commoning – Commoner. A brief excursion into the etymology of these terms: each word connects the Latin words cum and munus. Cum (English “with”) denotes the joining of elements. Munus —
which is also found in the word “municipality” — means service, duty, obligation, and sometimes gift. All terms that conjoin cum and munus, such as communion, community, communism, and, of course, communication, point to a co-obligation — a linkage between use rights, benefits, and duty. As Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval write, commons “not only designate what is pooled,” but also the commoners themselves — “those who have ‘duties in common.’”40

Commons are a pervasive, generative, and neglected social lifeform. They are Complex, Adaptive, Living Processes that generate wealth (both tangible and intangible) through which people address their shared needs with minimal or no reliance on markets or states. A commons arises as people engage in the social practices of Commoning, participate in Peer Governance, and develop collaborative forms of Provisioning in the course of using a resource or care-wealth. While every commons is different, all ultimately depend on the physical gifts of nature, and on sharing, collaboration, mutual respect and Gentle Reciprocity. A commons is constantly becoming.

• Every Commons arises through Commoning, which has three symbiotic aspects: Everyday Social Habits, Peer Governance, and Provisioning. This is the Triad of Commoning.

Commoner is an identity and social role that people acquire as they practice Commoning. It is associated with actual deeds, not an assigned legal or social title. Anyone is potentially a commoner. The more that a person aligns with a Commons practice and worldview, the more they become a commoner. 

Commoning is the exploratory process by which people devise and enact situation-specific systems of provisioning and Peer Governance as part of a larger process of unfolding our humanity. It occurs as ordinary people decide for themselves how to identify and meet shared needs, manage common wealth, and get along with each other. As people draw upon their Situated Knowing in assessing their problems, they are empowered to show creative agency in developing solutions that seem fair and effective to them. They also learn to live with ambiguities and uncertainties, and to respect the mysteries of the human condition. Commoning is the only way to become a Commoner. The power of commoning is not limited to interpersonal relations in groups but extends to the organizing of larger society as well.

• There is no Commons without Commoning and there is no Commoning without Peer Governance.

Commons-Public Partnership (CPP). An agreement of long-term cooperation between commoners and state institutions to meet specific needs. Either may initiate a CPP, but commoners retain control over the process. State institutions provide vital legal, financial, and/or administrative support to commoners, and commoners provide services to each other and the broader public. Examples include community-driven Wi-Fi systems, care such as nursing and eldercare, and neighborhood-managed projects implemented with government support. A CPP enables commoners to create convivial organizational structures that empower them to make their own decisions and bring about customized solutions.

Commonsverse describes the loosely connected world of different types of commons which can be seen as a federated Pluriverse of commons. Unlike capitalism (the economy) and liberal democracy (the political sphere), the Commonsverse integrates the economy with the political and social realms.

Communion is the process through which Commoners participate in interdependent relationships with the more-than-human world. Communion shifts a person’s understanding of human/nature relations out of the economistic framework (e.g., “resource management,” or the commodification and financialization of “nature’s services”) into one that respects the intrinsic value of the nonhuman world. This fundamental self-awareness leads to feelings of gratitude, respect, and reverence for the sacred dimensions of life in the ways that human Provisioning is organized. 

Complex Adaptive Systems are self-organizing, self-healing, living systems such as the brain, cells, ant colonies, the biosphere, socio-ecological systems, and many commons. The term is used in complexity sciences, a heterodox scientific approach often used in evolutionary science, chemistry, biology, and physics. Insights from complexity sciences help move beyond a Newtonian worldview of cause and effect to one that is holistic, nonlinear, and interactive. The free interplay of agents following simple principles operating at the local level can —
with no big-picture knowledge or end goals at the outset — self-organize in larger, more complex systems (or, as biologist Lynn Margulis put it, produce the mutual engendering of new living systems known as “symbiogenesis”).41

Convivial Tools is a term inspired by Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality (1973). It refers to tools, technologies, and infrastructures that strengthen creativity and self-determination, such as everyday, general-purpose tools, the patterns for Commoning we suggest in this book, or open source software-based tools such as OpenStreetMap.42 Convivial tools are important because “we shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us,” as Marshall McLuhan reminds us.43 A tool is convivial if people have access to the design and knowledge needed to create it; if it allows creative adaptation to one’s own circumstances; and if it is appropriate in the specific local context. (Are suitable materials and skills available? Is it compatible with the local landscape and culture?) Convivial tools are fundamentally empowering because they help people discover and develop their own priorities, learning capacities, and skills. They emancipate us from proprietary closed tools that interfere with personal learning, sharing, modification, and re-use. However, the use of convivial tools can be impractical in some circumstances because of their time demands. 

Cosmo-local Production is an internet-enabled provisioning system in which people share “light” knowledge and design via peer-to-peer learning and the internet, while building “heavy” physical things such as machinery, cars, housing, furniture, and electronics locally.44 Producing cosmo-locally lets one avoid the costs of proprietary design based on patents or trademarks. It also lets one reduce production costs through the use of less expensive locally sourceable materials and module designs that enable Interoperability, which facilitates Pooling and Sharing.

Crowdfunding is a practice of Collaborative Financing based on digital platforms. It refers to large numbers of people (the “crowd”), rather than just immediate group members, pooling small amounts of money to finance endeavors that will produce collective benefits. Crowdfunding does not necessarily help the commons because some campaigns serve to provide free seed-capital for startup companies, with no shared equity or Peer Governance. However, many crowdfunding efforts, such as ones hosted by the Madrid-based Goteo platform, deliberately use this financing technique to advance Commoning.

DIT means do-it-together. It is complementary to DIY, do-it-yourself, which in practice is often do-it-together. DIT helps name a form of DIY that is commons-based. Both seek to avoid relying on money and markets, and contribute to Money-Lite Commoning.

Dividing Up, as distinct from Sharing, refers to the nonreciprocal allocation of objects — food, money, things, land, bicycles, tools —
among members of groups (family, strangers, small groups, big networks) without calculating everyone’s individual benefit in discrete units. Dividing up sometimes happens in response to tacit or formal demands. 

Emergence is the process by which the interaction among living agents unexpectedly produces entirely novel and more complex organization at larger scales. The new systemic properties are not contained within any individual element or aggregation of such elements, but emerge spontaneously without any obvious cause and effect. Countless local, individual interactions give rise to the complex structures of language and culture. So, too, the peer interactions of networked communities for open source software, scientific research, and Cosmo-local Production exhibit emergent behaviors.

Enclosure is the act of fencing land, forest, or pasture to convert shared wealth that commoners have depended upon for their needs into private property. Historically, enclosures were political initiatives by feudal lords and, later, by early capitalists and parliaments. Today enclosures are generally driven by investors and corporations, often in collusion with the nation-state, to privatize and commodify all sorts of shared wealth — land, water, digital information, creative works, genetic knowledge — dispossessing Commoners in the process. Enclosures can be achieved through technical means such as digital rights management and paywalls; political means such as privatization, trade treaties, and financialization; and social means such as consumer culture, advertising, and the forced acculturation of people to Western capitalist culture. Enclosure is the opposite of Commoning in that it separates what commoning otherwise connects: people and land, you and me, present and future generations, technical infrastructures and their governance, rulers and the ruled, wilderness lands and the people who have stewarded them for generations. Enclosure is included here as a commons-friendly term (even though it is a hostile act!) because it enables us to name the private appropriation of shared wealth.

Enlivenment describes life and aliveness as fundamental categories for thinking about the world and world-making. This means that feelings, subjectivity, and meaning-making are empirical dimensions of living beings that science must reckon with as consequential forces in evolution. Enlivenment is a central idea in ecophilosophy (Andreas Weber), patterns philosophy (Christopher Alexander), and Commons. It is produced by Ubuntu Rationality, Care, and the use of Convivial Tools, among other activities.

Exonym refers to names or terms used by outsiders that mischaracterize phenomena that are experienced in very different ways by those on the inside. The discourse of economics, for example, typically uses terms that are ontologically incorrect in attempting to describe commoning. What economists regard as “resources” — fungible, utilitarian things — commoners regard as biowealth and care-wealth that have meaning for their community. Economic “rationality” presumes an ideal of humanity that commoners would not recognize. Political scientist and anthropologist James Scott first brought the term to our attention in his book Against the Grain.45

Faux commons is a term used to describe cooperative activities that resemble commoning but that are in fact hosted or governed by noncommoners such as businesses, state entities, or investment group. A prominent example is Facebook, a closed, proprietary network platform for sharing that exploits user data for private business purposes. Digital platforms like Airbnb and Uber purport to promote sharing, but in fact are transaction-based, capital-driven enterprises, not commons. Contractual partnerships that involve reciprocal benefits such as patent pools among drug makers are another instance of faux commons. They are chiefly organized for specific market purposes, and not as long-term covenants among participants to share stewardship responsibilities and benefits over time. These distinctions matter because businesses enterprises are often eager to disguise their mercantile interests and claim democratic legitimacy by pretending to be about sharing, community, and the common good, i.e., to “commonswash.”  

Federation refers to a group of committed participants, teams, or organizations that elect to coordinate or collaborate with each other based on agreed upon objectives, ethical values, or shared history. Although the term federation is usually associated with nation-states or other state bodies coming together in some form — and therefore associated with the term federal — social collectives and organizations may also federate to pursue mutual protection, collaboration, and support. A federation is different from a network in that participants in a network may or may not share goals or deep commitments whereas participants in a federation are actively dedicated to a shared mission. Another difference: a (distributed) network is completely horizontal and a fully fledged P2P structure whereas a federation can be heterarchical. [See Heterarchy]

Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) is software with source code that is open to be Shared and that has been licensed for anyone to use, copy, study, and change. These freedoms — authorized by a variety of licenses that reverse the normal workings of copyright law — encourage users to fix bugs and improve and develop the software. By contrast, proprietary software uses copyright law to prohibit users from seeing or modifying the source code and creates artificial Scarcities (access to code is restricted even though it can be shared for little or no cost). FLOSS increases the transparency of code, and as a result — as more people can scrutinize it — its security and stability. FLOSS also empowers people by enabling them to adapt code to their own purposes and to build more secure privacy protections into software. The GNU/Linux operating system, which powers millions of servers, desktops, and other devices, is perhaps the best-known FLOSS program.

Freedom-in-Connectedness is a notion of freedom that acknowledges that we are connected to nature, other people, communities, and institutions. It is how a human being unfolds, discovers their identity, and flourishes. It is a more realistic ideal than libertarian notions of freedom, which invariably focus on maximum individual choice and autonomy. In this sense, the idea of freedom as commonly used is an illusion because none of us can survive as Isolated-I’s, let alone unfold our potential. The idea of the fully autonomous, self-made individual is actually ridiculous because no human being can survive without the psychological and social support of others. [See Nested-I]

Generated Process is an exploratory, stepwise, and evolving process for generating an enlivening environment such as a Commons. It is a living, dynamic, adaptive process that is always becoming and incomplete. It stands in contrast to a fabrication process that builds something according to fixed, predetermined plans. A generated process is the only way to bring about resilient structures and to deepen relationships because only living processes can beget living systems. Whatever has been generated creates a deeper resonance and feelings of wholeness and aliveness.46 The collaborations that produced this book — not just between the co-authors but with their many colleagues and advisors — is an example of how something can be produced by a generated process. Everyone involved, and the ideas themselves, grew and transformed over the course of Free, Fair and Alive’s creation. 

Gentle Reciprocity has a different character than strict reciprocity, in which trading partners try to calculate in precise terms who owes what to whom. In any tit-for-tat relationship, the goal is to achieve greater value than one spends, or at least a monetary equivalent. The reciprocity that exists in a Commons is generally a gentle reciprocity in which people choose not to calculate in precise terms who owes whom a favor, time, money, or labor. In a commons, it is important to be neighborly, and not just behave as a “rational” market actor. Commons offer a hospitable context for turning Gentle Reciprocity into a habit, which builds social trust and the capacity to work together in constructive ways.

Heterarchy is well-explained by the original Greek ετεραρχία: the term heter means “other, different,” and archy means “rule.” In a heterarchy, different types of rules and organizational structures are combined. They may include, for example, top-down hierarchies and bottom-up participation (both of which are vertical), and peer-to-peer dynamics (which are horizontal). In a heterarchy, people can achieve socially mindful autonomy by combining multiple types of governance in the same system. For example, a hierarchy form may exist within a heterarchy. Heterarchies are not simply peer-to-peer distributed ways of organizing, which are often hampered by a lack of structure. Nor is heterarchy the simple opposite of hierarchy. Rather, it is a hybrid that allows for greater openness, flexibility, democratic participation, and federation. When tasks are made modular, it becomes easier for heterarchical governance structures to flourish. 

Interoperability means that different tools, computational systems, or technological products can interconnect and work seamlessly with each other, without needing a specific design to do so. Interoperability by definition is enabled by specific data formats, protocols, and open standards. One example is ASCII (Abbreviated Standard Code for Information Interchange), a character-encoded standard for electronic communication. Interoperability is key for processes to work well in a network environment, such as Cosmo-local Production. It is also critical in preventing one agent or market participant from securing a monopoly or controlling others through control of the design standards.

Intra-Action, a concept introduced by physicist and philosopher Karen Barad, describes how individual entities come together to create a new “entangled agency” that does not otherwise exist in preexisting individual agents. Think of crowd behavior and viral cultural phenomena. When two entities intra-act, their ability to act emerges from within the relationship itself, not as a function of the discrete individuals involved. The entangled agency constantly changes and adapts with the relationship itself. This concept helps us get beyond simplistic cause and effect explanations and suggests that responsibility for actions is spread among intra-acting entities, each of which may have different levels of intentionality and delayed manifestations. From the perspective of intra-action, familiar ideas such as subject/object dualism, linear time, and individual agency are incomplete and misleading ways of understanding how events happen in the world. [See Emergence]

Market/State. Although markets and states are often cast as adver­saries — the public sector vs. the private sector — in fact they share many deep commitments and are highly interdependent. It makes sense to speak of them as partners in a shared vision. Both see market activity, economic growth, individualism, and technological innovation as the drivers of human progress. Each depends on the other in specific ways, too. Capital-driven markets look to the state for subsidies, legal privileges, research support, and mitigation of market externalities such as pollution and social inequality. And states, for their part, look to markets as sources of tax revenue, jobs, and geo-political influence. 

Money-Lite Commoning is a style of Commoning that seeks to reduce the need for money and markets. Commoning enables decommodified solutions to problems and therefore can avoid relying on markets and spending, both of which require that someone acquire more money. Commoning itself is money-lite in that commoners by definition rely on Dit, Co-Use, Sharing, Dividing Up, and Mutualization as much as possible. The point of money-lite commoning is to help people focus on their real needs, and to escape the endless cycle of buying and disempowerment that a consumerist culture generally entails.

Mutualizing means to contribute and belong to a group enterprise with a larger, enduring social purpose; this association in turn entitles participants to specific individual benefits. However, members do not necessarily receive equal value or the same benefits in return for what they give, as in a market transaction. They typically receive some stipulated benefit based on need or other criteria. The benefits of mutualization are socially agreed upon, often based on differential shares and predetermined formulas. An insurance pool and social security fund are classic examples. However mutualization is structured, it is critical that everyone with a stake in the mutualized pool have a say in the agreement. It is a peer-determined reciprocity, a specific form of practicing Gentle Reciprocity.

Nested-I describes the existential interdependency of human beings on other humans and the larger world, which co-creates and supports our personal development. To use the term Nested-I rather than “individual” is to recognize that one’s identity, talents, and aspirations are ultimately rooted in relationships. With this self-awareness, the person who recognizes himself or herself as a Nested-I realizes that self-interests and larger collective interests are not opposed to each other (Individual/Collective), but can be aligned. The Nested-I stands in contrast to the human ideal celebrated in modern, secular societies that everyone’s life is defined by their individual achievements and pursuits, free from the associations of their communities, history, ethnicity, race, religion, sex, and so on. The “Isolated-I” is perfectly depicted by Homo economicus, the model of a human being used by economists: a person who is self-interested, rational, utility-maximizing, and absolutely autonomous. [See Freedom-in-Connectedness and Ubuntu Rationality]

Non-Discriminatory Infrastructures are systems that foster mobility, communication, exchange, and energy flow in general ways open to all. The owner or steward of the infrastructure does not restrict access and use of the infrastructure based on specific criteria such as ethnicity, gender, social standing, nor charge one class of users more than another. 

Ontology as a philosophical term is the study of a person’s fundamental presuppositions about the nature of reality and how it is structured. Ontology is the “constitutional framework” of a person’s belief-system — the window through which one sees the world, our way of seeing and registering reality. Is the world divided into humanity and nature, individuals and collectives? Is the world a static place or is it in a constant state of becoming? We perceive and describe the world, and often act, based on our assumptions about reality. Participants in modern politics typically pursue a different cosmovision than, for example, an Indigenous culture, which sees nature, humans, and past and future generations as an integrated whole. As this suggests, the OntoStories one believes, have far-reaching implications for the sorts of social, economic, and political order that seem plausible and attractive.  

OntoShift refers to a shift in a person’s fundamental presuppositions and perspectives about the nature of reality and how it is structured. People’s ontological viewpoints are reflected in their perceptions of how people and objects exist in the world, and, as a result, what general types of culture, political economy, and coordination structures they see as possible and desirable. 

OntoStory is a shorthand term for an ontological narrative. [See Ontology] 

Patterns are a way of understanding the nature of order in the world. They help us identify structural regularities and relationships among different types of phenomena (such as commoning) without relying on rigid abstractions or over-specified principles that tend to ignore context and history. A pattern of human interactions distills the essence of many successful solutions, as demonstrated by practitioners over time (such as Commoners), to problems that occur over and over again in similar contexts. Every Commons, for example, has the challenge of building trust, making decisions that reflect everybody’s feelings, and using money in socially healthy ways, without its pernicious effects. Patterns are open and always interconnected; no pattern is complete unto itself. [See Vocabulary]

Peers are people who have equal social and political power relative to other members of a group or network. Peers have different talents and personalities, but they see each other as having the same rights and capabilities to contribute to a collaborative project and to decide how it shall proceed. [See Nested-I, Ubuntu Rationality]

Peer Governance is that part of Commoning by which people make decisions, set boundaries, enforce rules, and deal with conflicts — both within Commons and among different commons. In a peer-governed world, individuals see each other as Peers with the equal potential to participate in a collective process, not as adversaries competing to seize control of a central apparatus of power. Building on Elinor Ostrom’s design principles, Peer Governance is a central concept because there is no Commoning and no Commonsverse without Peer Governance, which is distinct from governing for the people and from governing with the people (Participation). It is governing through the people.

P2P (Peer-to-Peer) Networks are a powerful form of organization in which participants contribute to the production of Commons in nonhierarchical ways. The internet and digital technologies have given rise to significant P2P networks devoted to free and open source software, various wikis including Wikipedia, collaborative content creation websites and archives, and global design and production communities. As distributed networks that allow any node to connect directly with any other node, P2P networks unleash forms of collaborative creativity that are simply not possible in centralized networks, in which all nodes pass through a single hub, or decentralized networks, in which all nodes still pass through hubs of some sort.

Pluriverse names an understanding of the world in which countless groups of people create and re-create their own distinctive cultural realities, each of which constitutes a world. This term is necessary because many contemporary crises stem from the belief that there is a One-World World, a kind of single Euro-modern reality. To say that the world is a pluriverse is to say that there is no single source of being (that is, to invoke a plural ontology) and that no knowledge system is inherently superior to others. A pluriverse is “a world in which many worlds fit,” as the Zapatistas say. This points to a conundrum: how can the different societies that constitute the human species accept that many worlds must coexist together on a single planet?  

Pooling refers to a form of contributing to a common fund or provisions of any kind. The contributions are gathered together for agreed-upon purposes in sufficient quantities, and then allocated in agreed-upon ways for certain purposes. 

Price Sovereignty means the capacity to reject the terms that markets offer, including prices. By achieving a certain independence from markets, Commoners acquire price sovereignty by transparently and collaboratively self-determining the terms of exchange among all interacting partners involved. As a result, they can choose to meet people’s needs for free or at lower prices than charged on the market. This is a much-overlooked strategic power that gives people significant autonomy from market pressures and state coercion. Because commoners are withdrawing from markets and not seeking to dominate them, price sovereignty in this sense does not mean anticompetitive behavior prohibited by antitrust law. 

Provisioning. Meeting people’s needs through a Commons is called provisioning. The term is an alternative to the word “production,” which is inextricably associated with the neglect of the nonmarket spheres of family, community, and Care, and a focus on market prices, efficiency, the externalization of costs, and so on. The purpose of provisioning is to meet people‘s needs, whereas the purpose of production (whether capitalist or socialist) is to generate profits for those producing the goods and services, and by producing them. Provisioning through commons occurs everywhere, but they generate shared wealth using different ways of allocating and distributing it. A basic goal of provisioning is to reintegrate economic behaviors with the rest of one’s life, including social well-being, ecological relationships, and ethical concerns. 

Public/Commons Circuits of Finance is a strategy of Collaborative Financing that allows taxpayer funds administered by government to be used to support Commons — or even privilege commons-first strategies. However, unlike state subsidies to corporations, which primarily aim to spur economic growth and direct benefits to shareholders, public/commons financing seeks to expand Commoning and commons-based infrastructures. The goal is to help people re-order their lives so they can become more self-sustaining and less dependent on the market/state and its imperatives.

Relational Ontology holds that the relations between entities are more fundamental than the entities themselves. It means that living systems develop and thrive through their interactions and Intra-Actions with each other. As a social system based on how people come together to collaborate and sustain themselves, a Commons is based on a relational ontology. This perspective stands in contrast to the vision of reality that undergirds market capitalism, which sees the world as based on isolated, self-made individuals with no primary relationships of history, religion, ethnicity, geography, gender, and so forth. Conceiving the nature of reality through relational ontology requires different relational categories such as Nested-I and Ubuntu Rationality. 

Relationalized Property is about “other ways of having” that are aligned with Commoning and go beyond the exclusion, extraction, and marketization associated with conventional property ownership. A society built around property ownership tends to produce haves and have-nots and abusive concentrations of capital and power. Relationalized property is a novel class of socio-legal governance and provisioning that partially or completely neutralizes exclusive ownership rights over things regarded as property. People decide to adopt a relationalized property regime and manage shared wealth through Peer Governance; the regime is not imposed on them. It enables forms of interrelated possession of property that is life-enhancing and strengthens relationships — with each other, the nonhuman world, past and future generations, and the common good.

Semi-Permeable Membranes are what the boundaries of a Commons should be. Like other living social organisms, Commons need to protect themselves from external forces that might harm them while remaining open to flows of nourishment and signals from the environment. Therefore, a commons functions best if it develops a semi-permeable membrane for itself rather than a tight, rigid boundary. This flexible skin, figuratively speaking, both assures its integrity by preventing Enclosure and other harms while allowing it to develop nourishing, symbiotic relationships with other living organisms.

Sharing is a general, nonspecific term that points to forms of allocation that are nonreciprocal. Based on what is being shared, we differentiate it as Sharing, Dividing Up, and Co-Using. All of these forms are usually preceded by Pooling. 

• Sharing is the voluntary, nonreciprocal transfer of knowledge, information, ideas, code, design, and other intangibles that are inexpensively copied. Free and open source software communities are classic practitioners of sharing. 
• Dividing Up is the allocation of finite, depletable resources. It differs from sharing because sharing generally increases the use-value of what is being shared; that effect does not apply for Dividing Up. (Sharing must also be distinguished from the “sharing economy,” which is not really about sharing but about microrental markets.)
• Co-Using is a social arrangement for access and use of a shared resource or Care-Wealth.

Situated Knowing refers to the intuitive, embodied expertise and practical know-how that derives from living and working within a particular domain. When people grow up in a given environment from childhood, they are immersed in certain rhythms and techniques. They learn subtle cues about plants, wood, craft materials, game, the weather, and other elements of the local landscape. They develop a deep familiarity with their circumstances that cannot be obtained through book learning.

Stint is an access rule to prevent something from being overused or abused. In subsistence cultures, there are often highly specific rules for how and when a person may harvest wood from the forest or rushes from a wetland. A “stinted commons” is therefore one that is managed to protect the renewable capacities of a natural system. “Without stints there is no true Commons,” writes commons scholar Lewis Hyde.47 [See Capping] 

Ubuntu Rationality describes a logic of human interaction that recognizes the deep connections between a person’s interests and the well-being of others. It points to a dynamic where a person’s unfolding requires the unfolding of others, and vice-versa. The term is a counterpoint to the conventional idea of economic rationality, which is defined as self-interested, calculative, acquisitive behavior which tends to be at the expense of others. When people can see themselves as Nested-I’s embedded in a Pluriversal set of relationships, they begin to exhibit Ubuntu Rationality. Ubuntu is a term in various Bantu languages in South Africa that denotes the deep interdependence of “me” and “other.”

Value Sovereignty. Although most Commons exist within the market/state system, making them vulnerable to Enclosure, a commons generally strives to protect its moral and cultural identity and to control the value it generates. In short, it seeks to secure its own Value Sovereignty. 

Vernacular Law is a form of law that originates in informal, unofficial zones of society as an instrument of moral authority and social order. While vernacular law may or may not be morally good in itself, it stands in contrast to State Law, which reflects the particular concerns of state power and jurisprudence. Custom functions as Vernacular Law by expressing the practical judgments, ethical wisdom, and Situated Knowledge of people rooted in a particular place or circumstances.

Part II: The Triad of Commoning

Introduction

Over the years, there have been a number of attempts to conceptualize commons with greater clarity. But no one has yet imagined a framework that at once speaks to the mundane realities of self-organization, the inner transformations that commoning catalyzes, and how these might transform the political economy over time. That is the challenge that we take up in the next three chapters by offering a comprehensive framework for commons and commoning. We hope to get beyond the growing confusion and faux-populism associated with these terms, and provide a more rigorous conceptualization. If the notion of commons is used as a buzzword for everything in the world we would like to see shared, it loses its transformative power. 

Frameworks are gateways. They subtly but deeply influence the ways that we perceive the world. They usher us into a specific interpretation of the world, much as opening a door takes us into one room and leaves others unexplored. Frameworks structure worldviews. They provide an analytical scaffold and a language for making sense of what we can observe. For these reasons, we provide in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 a scaffold and language for looking at the world of commons and commoning.  

Our framework builds on the insights about the role of subjectivity, relationality, and language described in Part I of this book. Our Triad of Commoning: Social Life, Peer Governance, and Provisioning is based on the premise that commoning is primarily about creating and maintaining relationships — among people in small and big communities and networks, between humans and the nonhuman world, and between us and past and future generations. This relational understanding of the world will necessarily bring about new ways of thinking about value. It also helps us escape from standard economic and policy frameworks, and from overly economistic, resource-based understandings of the commons, both of which fail to express its social dynamics.  

Two years before writing these lines, when we began to think about this book, we didn’t aspire to propose a new framework. However, as we progressed, we felt increasingly uncomfortable with the ontological premises and languages used by most of the commons literature. They often did not come to terms with many of the things we had observed in the contemporary commons world. After a year of wrestling with this unease, we decided to start from scratch. In March 2017, we began to reflect more deeply and imagine a framework — one step at a time, slowly, iteratively — that could blend theory and practice. It was as if we were changing the point of departure for a journey. To explore the outskirts of Paris, for example, we could depart from either of the city’s two most important train stations — Gare du Nord or Gare de l’Est, each only a stone’s throw away from the other. Choosing Gare du Nord would take us towards Lille in northern France, or to St. Quentin in the Hauts-de-France region. But were we to instead enter Gare de l’Est, just five hundred steps away, a whole new set of destinations would be possible: Mulhouse in Alsace or Stuttgart in Germany, along with dozens of others. The distance between the gates is trivial, but the actual point of departure makes a huge difference in what kinds of worlds we can travel to. So it is with the frameworks we choose to interpret the world. The more a framing structure is true to our humanity and aligned with our aspirations and circumstances, the more likely that it will take us to destinations that are right for us. 

Our framework aspires to articulate the deep correspondences among the bewildering diversity of the commons. Despite vivid differences among commons focused on natural resources, digital systems, and social mutuality, they all share structural and social similarities. Their affinities have just never been adequately identified and set forth in a coherent framework. Our idea was to make visible that which connects commons experiences in medieval times and today, in digital and analogue spheres, in cities and the countryside, in communities dedicated to water and to software code. Unraveling the tangled “genetic history” of commons to identify these connections can help explain why the commons is as old as mankind and as modern as the internet. 

The structural commonalities that we identify are based on the recurring elements and relationships that we call patterns. Patterns help us see the common core of diverse world-making commons without ignoring their differences. A patterns approach recognizes that each commons develops and evolves in a different context, in different spaces and times. Each is shaped by different people, in different societies and environments. It is thus entirely logical that every commons will enact patterns according to its singular context. To fairly allocate water in the Swiss Alps in the sixteenth century requires a different set of rules than to fairly share bandwidth in the twenty-first. To govern a commons within a modern capitalist society is a different challenge than doing so within an Indigenous culture. What matters in each instance is for participants to produce a fair share for all. 

When you have a closer look at how things are done in diverse commons, you begin to discover a world ordered by patterns. Using a patterns-based approach, we can grasp the idea that commons are enacted in myriad ways, without being merely arbitrary or accidental, and without ever being implemented exactly the same way twice. We can identify recurrent features of commons that are often not explicitly named. John C. Thomas has written that patterns “are one way to capture what is invariant while leaving the flexibility to deal with the specifics of geography, culture, language, goals, and technologies.”1 In this respect, patterns resemble DNA, a set of instructions that are underspecified so that they can be adapted to local circumstances. “Does the DNA contain a full description of the organism to which it will give rise?” asks Christopher Alexander in his book The Nature of Order. “The answer is no. The genome contains instead a program of instructions for making the organism — a generative program — in which cytoplasmic constituents of eggs and cells are essential players along with the genes like the DNA coding for the sequence of amino acids in a protein.”2 

Our framework naturally draws on the robust scholarly literature exploring the commons — a body of work that has proliferated since Professor Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 2009 for her pioneering studies of collective resource management. The International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) and its journal7 continue this valuable work. Ostrom’s famous eight design principles for enduring commons institutions — set forth in her 1990 book Governing the Commons and developed over the past generation with hundreds of colleagues — represent a major beachhead of understanding. But these principles do not say much about the inner life of commons or the complexities of what it means “to common.” (They do speak strongly to issues of governance, which we take up in Chapter 5.) 

Our Triad framework points to the idea that commoners are engaged in “world-making in a pluriverse” because that phrase captures the core purpose of commoning: the creation of peer-governed, context-specific systems for free, fair, and sustainable lives. At the heart of the Framework is what we call The Triad — the three interconnected spheres of Social Life, Peer Governance, and Provisioning. Or, in more conventional terms: the social, the institutional, and the economic spheres. We find it useful to structure our thinking around these realms, which doesn’t mean that they are separate and distinct. Each sphere of the Triad simply provides a different perspective for looking at the same phenomena. Each is deeply interconnected with the others, as the accompanying image suggests. 

It is reasonable to ask, how we can possibly generalize about the commons, knowing that there is no such thing as cultural universals? Is a coherent, general understanding of the phenomenon really possible? We believe it is — if such an understanding acknowledges the immensely varied on-the-ground realities and distills their essential regularities! That’s what patterns do. They avoid the trap of reductionism, don’t oversimplify messy realities, and help to avoid a totalizing way of understanding the world. Patterns provide a way to generate insights while relying on situated knowing — people’s experiences, know-how, and intuition. And, most importantly, they help us create an open framework that is adaptable by design, and certainly not the last word. We therefore offer a flexible template, not a blueprint, and a commons vocabulary, not a classical, prescriptive taxonomy. 

A Word on Methodology

By learning to see through a patterns lens, we began a process of what is called “pattern mining.” It was fairly straight-forward. We asked: What problems show up in the commons again and again? Decision making? Money? Concerns for overexploitation of resources? And so on. There is an endless list of problems to be addressed if the commons narrative is going to be true to life. 

We then looked for successful solutions that actual commons have implemented. We looked everywhere — in all realms of life, in the academic literature, and in working projects. We reflected on our own commoning experiences and we conducted many long interviews with commoners around the world while documenting their activities and answers. We looked at the solutions people had devised. Do they really work? Do they work but only in the short term? And do they resist the seductions and ruthless appropriations of capitalism? We compared what approaches people really applied with tentative theoretical insights or claims about the commons. Then we dared to coin abstractions — the patterns — that constitute our framework. We tested each one out with fellow commoners and scholars. We asked them if our insights resonated with their research and experiences, which then led to a long series of corrections, deletions, and adaptations. 

The result is our Triad framework, which organizes and distills the patterns we identified. Together, they constitute the beginning of a commons language — a commons pattern language, as some would call it. We do not presume that our framework wholly captures the commons, which is, ultimately experiential — a phenomenon of life beyond representation. It is more like a map that provides structure, terminologies, and pathways for making sense of the topic. We certainly don’t want our map to be confused with the territory. It’s just a map. And like any map, ours is inflected with our own parochial biases. If we think of the world as a pluriverse — a fractal federation of countless unique and yet connected worlds — then we must emphasize that our framework unavoidably reflects some of our own cultural perspectives despite our best attempts to take a cosmopolitan perspective. 

4. The Social Life of Commoning

The British sociologist Raymond Williams once wrote, “Culture is ordinary.” We could say much the same about commoning. It is terribly ordinary. Commoning is what common people decide for themselves in their specific circumstances if they want to get along with each other and produce as much wealth for everyone as possible. If commoning can be considered a way of life or a type of culture, then it provides what any culture must — “meaning both in a formal and in a deeply existential sense,” as art sociologist Pascal Gielen writes.1 Modern societies have largely forgotten about commoning. Therefore, showcasing its elemental dailyness opens the door for seeing how the commons can provide a platform for effective alternatives to capitalism.

We start our explorations with the Social Life of commoning because its motifs constitute the core of any commons while also manifesting in the two other spheres, Provisioning and Peer Governance. Over the course of more than fifteen years, we have visited dozens of commons, talked with hundreds of people, and read about scores of commons in the scholarly literature. We have come to see that commoning is not like an on/off switch, something that exists or it doesn’t. It is more a matter of intensity like a dimmer switch on a light; the intensity of various patterns of commoning may be weak or strong, according to what people really do, but its degree of illumination and continuity lead us to the threshold of conscious self-organization. This means that we have the capacity to affect the process — to intensify commoning — at any given moment.

People may or may not be self-aware about these patterns of Social Life. In Indigenous cultures, tradition and habit can make commoning seem utterly normal, rendering it invisible. In Western industrialized societies, commoning is invisible as well, but for a different reason: it has been culturally marginalized. That is why we have embarked upon our “archeological excavations” of commons around the world — to bring the little-discussed realities of commoning into the bright light of day.

It is important that people experiment with these patterns so that they can understand commoning better and develop new ways of living, provisioning, and governing themselves. The capacity to make change lies right before us, and is at once cultural, organizational, generative, and political, if we keep in mind the three spheres of the Triad. It can transform our economy and our political systems, our institutions and ourselves. As J.K. Gibson-Graham have written, “If to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and the relation is reciprocal, then the project of history making is never a distant one but always right here, on the borders of our sensing, thinking, feeling, moving bodies.”2 Politics ultimately originates in our subjectivity, say Gibson-Graham, and in “the sensational and gravitational experience of embodiment.”

Pascal Gielen refers to culture as “a stealth laboratory for new forms of life, an omnipresent incubator, hardly noticed precisely because it is everywhere.”3 The commons is such a laboratory. In modern times, market capitalism and its categories of thought have more or less mandated how we will behave, invest, organize institutions, and so forth, by presuming that human beings are basically selfish, materialistic, utility-maximizing individuals. No wonder commoning, with its different insights about human beings, is so often seen as strange. It has been eclipsed by the shiny cultural mindscape of modernity.

And yet, the way commoning catalyzes change is clear: the more you align yourself with a commons worldview and the more you practice commoning, the more you learn how to become a commoner. This, in turn, has sweeping ramifications for economics, politics, and culture. The patterns that comprise the Social Life of Commoning are specific forms of cooperation, sharing, and ways that people relate to each other. One could say that a commons arises when the patterns of Social Life reach a sufficient density of practice, threshold of self-organization, and continuity to express themselves as a coherent social institution.

• The Social Life of Commoning
• Cultivate Shared Purpose and Values
• Ritualize Togetherness
• Contribute Freely
• Practice Gentle Reciprocity
• Trust Situated Knowing
• Deepen Communion with Nature
• Preserve Relationships in Addressing Conflicts
• Reflect on Your Peer Governance

Cultivate Shared Purpose and Values

Shared purpose and values are the lifeblood of any commons. Without them, a commons loses its coherence and vitality. But shared purpose and values can only arise when people contribute from their own passion and commitment, connect with each other, and share certain experiences. A commons does not necessarily start with shared purpose and values. These outcomes must be earned by commoners over time as they struggle to bring their diverse perspectives into greater alignment. This is important because the sense of shared purpose in a commons can’t be formally imposed or declared. It must arise organically through meaningful commoning over time. A rooted culture cannot be built overnight.

Cultivate shared purpose and values

Just declaring shared purpose and values is like planting a tree and not watering it. Shared purpose and values need to be cultivated through collective reflection, traditions, celebrations, and participation in all kinds of activities. All this can help strengthen mutual commitments. To be sure, the formal design of organizations and infrastructures can help, but there is no substitute for commoning to align and deepen people’s concerns and values. This takes time.

At Next Barn Over — the CSA farm described in Chapter 1 — the commitment to fresh, organic local food is cultivated by hosting family dinners, inviting people to volunteer, suggesting recipes using seasonal vegetables, and reaching out to help needy neighborhoods. The best way to bring people together is to be authentic. Ideally, everyone should be able to contribute something they really enjoy doing. The most helpful question is not, what do we need? It is, what do we have? What is possible with what is available here and now? This is reflected in the poems that Next Barn Over occasionally sends to members, which included this one by Wendell Berry:

• What We Need is Here
• Geese appear high over us,
• pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
• as in love or sleep, holds
• them to their way, clear
• in the ancient faith: what we need
• is here. And we pray, not
• for new earth or heaven, but to be
• quiet in heart, and in eye,
• clear. What we need is here.

Ritualize Togetherness

One of the most important ways to strengthen shared purpose and values is by ritualizing togetherness — meeting regularly, sharing deeply, cooking together, celebrating successes, candidly assessing failures. This is essential to building a culture of commoning and a shared identity.

Ritualize togetherness

The rituals of togetherness can be as simple as regular meetings or as complicated as the specialized practices of an agroecology commons. A fair amount of community fun and frolic is also required. The many farmers of Mexico, New Mexico, and Colorado who participate in acequia irrigation commons have learned over centuries to ritualize togetherness. Everyone is, of course, concerned about his or her own allotment of water, but everyone also works together to maintain the water ditches and track the ecological limits of water usage. Software hackers are renowned for their creative rituals such as hackathons to figure out how to solve software problems and invent jargon that is understood only by them. The Quechua overseeing the Potato Park in Peru are bound together through their spiritual values and practices, much as the religious practices of Indonesian subak rice farmers help them coordinate when to plant seeds and irrigate their fields without depleting finite waters.

Rituals tend to work best when they are woven into ordinary daily life, and are not treated as something separate and unusual. At Enspiral, a networked guild of several hundred participants, participants ritualize their group life through regular, in-person retreats. In many countries such as Greece, Italy, France, and Finland, regional festivals are a way that people have celebrated the ethic and accomplishments of commoning. What better way to Ritualize Togetherness than a party or festival, especially among strangers? Indeed, some commoners make a party out of everything. At the many open workshops of Konglomerat, in Dresden, Germany, when it’s time to clean shared rooms, workshops, machinery, and toilets, members put a “Putzival” on the group’s agenda. The term sounds cute, clean, and fun at once, because “putzig” (the adjective) means “cute” and “putzen” (the verb) means “to clean,” making it kind of a cute Cleanup Festival. People get the music on and have fun getting rid of dust and dirt.

Contribute Freely

Contribute freely means giving without expecting to receive anything of equivalent value, at least not here and now. It also means that when people do receive something, it is without feeling the need to reciprocate in direct ways. Wherever we contribute freely, the use of quid pro quos is minimized and the potential for sharing and dividing up is enhanced. Such acts occur when community gardeners break ground in the spring, or when people submit editorial content to Wikipedia with no expectation of return or even formal credit. They just do it, for a variety of reasons — to learn a skill, join a community, earn respect, build job credentials, or simply to be part of something. By contributing freely, people also get back something they really enjoy, like the flowers from a community garden or the food grown there. People contribute freely when they give money to crowdfunding campaigns, volunteer their physical labor to maintain hiking trails, or organize neighborhood events. The giving is its own reward.

Contribute freely

It is important not to make overly broad claims about how to contribute freely in a commons because so much is situational. As long as a person’s contribution is not coerced, everything is fine. There cannot be an even-steven calculation or strict reciprocity at work, even though that is always a temptation. And yet, it is intriguing that a freely given contribution often comes back to the giver, somehow, somewhere. In his classic book The Gift, Lewis Hyde explores the spiritual and emotional significance of gift exchange as revealed in diverse cultures, anthropology, and literature. Explaining the difference between “circular giving” and reciprocal giving, Hyde writes:

When I give to someone from whom I do not receive (and yet I do receive elsewhere), it is as if the gift goes around a corner before it comes back. I have to give blindly. And I will feel a sort of blind gratitude as well … When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith.4

The idea to Contribute Freely is not a matter of unconditional, perpetual giving, however. Nor is it not necessarily circular. But if the goal is to contribute to a resilient commons, gift-givers need to make sure that their contributions are voluntary and commonly agreed upon, and not induced by pressure or sanctions from the outside. A commons won’t survive without freely given contributions. The specific ways of contributing to the common pool — where? when? how? in what quantities? — depend first and foremost on what people can really give. This in turn reflects their socioeconomic situation, customary rules, the level of people’s commitment, how they feel about a certain process, trust in decision-making processes, levels of participation, and so on. Of course, giving can also be simply an expression of goodwill or joy, or support for a cause.

To Contribute Freely helps build a healthy commons because it affirms the ethical norm of sharing, dividing up, and freely cooperating. A strict accounting of who gives what to whom may be helpful, but it is not always needed. While an accounting may work in larger and less personal contexts, a sharp focus on precise contributions and entitlements can undermine what makes a commons special: it’s a space where money doesn’t rule everything.

Practice Gentle Reciprocity

While commons surely need people to Contribute Freely, they are not a fairy tale land of self-sacrificing volunteers. There is also social exchange based on some form of reciprocity between persons. But the reciprocity in a commons is of a different character than that of trade in markets. Markets are based on individuals bargaining to extract as much as possible for themselves when making exchanges of equivalent monetary value (price).

Practice gentle reciprocity

What matters is the feeling of fairness, which is not necessarily the same as providing absolutely equal shares or equivalent money-value exchange to everyone. Fairness is about ensuring that all needs have been seen and met. A self-confident, gracious commons is thus one that is content with social equals enjoying a roughly balanced (but not absolutely equal) exchange over time. Choosing to not calculate in precise terms who owes whom is the practice of gentle reciprocity. It is often a matter of social wisdom and tolerance. Practicing strict, direct reciprocity by identifying people as debtors or creditors in the first place can create invidious social distinctions and fan divisive jealousies. Yet allowing free riders to shirk their fair contribution to a group’s efforts can generate resentments and deplete the group’s shared wealth and goodwill. “No one wants to be a sucker, keeping a promise that everyone else is breaking,” as Professor Elinor Ostrom once wrote.5 So a commons must ensure a rough equivalence of contribution and entitlement among its participants without insisting upon fully audited reciprocity and without coercing contributions.

Trust Situated Knowing

People who are able to ride a bicycle, play the piano, or run a marathon often cannot explain how they do it. They don’t consciously know what they know. That’s because much of our knowledge is tacit or embodied, and not necessarily conscious and cognitive. “We can know more than we can tell,” as Michael Polanyi puts it in his books on this subject.6 Our bodies often know different things than our conscious minds. We feel the arrival of spring, sense when something is amiss in a social setting, and relax when we visit beloved bodies of water. It is fair to say that commoning begins with these deep reservoirs of embodied and situated knowing and perception.

Trust situated knowing

Political scientist Frank Fischer has documented the habit of professional experts and bureaucracies to “ignore local knowledge that can help relate technical facts and social values.”7 A number of movements and organizations are actively trying to change this by calling attention to the deep wisdom of situated knowing. Permaculture designers insist on the necessity to “observe and interact” and to “creatively use and respond to change,” for example.8 People in the Transition Town movement take pride in co-creating a post-fossil world through “mind, heart and hand.”

Embodied experience opens up a very different way of understanding how to govern people and shared resources, going well beyond cognitive, behavioralist approaches. It points to other ways of knowing — intuition, feelings, subconscious knowledge, historical experience. Just as the physical human body somehow gives rise to consciousness, so the coming together of an I and we yields a new sphere of group consciousness that is best known through experience, not language. Anthropologist James Suzman described how he puzzled over the meaning of the term n!ow as used by the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen in southern Africa. The term seems to refer to a fundamental property of people and meat animals that manifests itself in the weather whenever such animals are killed or when a human is born or dies. But after failing to entirely grasp the elusive idea expressed by n!ow, Suzman concluded that some experiential and embodied knowledge simply cannot be expressed through language, let alone be translated into another language: “To know n!ow and understand it, you have to have been a product of this land, to have been shaped by its seasonal rhythms, and to have experienced the bonds that formed between hunters and their prey.”9

Our feelings are exquisitely sensitive to changes in the living natural world and our social relationships. In her book Tending the Wild, M. Kat Anderson shows how Native Americans in the area now known as California developed an astonishingly subtle knowledge of their local ecosystems and the lives of specific plant and animal species: “Several important insights were revealed to me as I walked with Native American elders and accompanied them on plant gathering walks. The first of these was that one gains respect for nature by using it judiciously. By using a plant or an animal, interacting with it where it lives, and tying your well-being to its existence, you can be intimate with it and understand it.”10

Situated knowing is obviously not confined to traditional peoples. Such forms of knowing and know-how are found among mountaineers assessing the safety of ice sheets, athletes sensing where and how rapidly the ball is traveling, and politicians sensing the public mood. Situated knowing is especially important in commons, where people often have subtle insights about their care-wealth. Indeed, this is what makes so many commons so vital and robust. Situated knowing, then, is not just “knowledge.” It is an outgrowth of doing and experience — including, often, deeper communion with nature and affective labor in stewarding it. Philosopher Donna Haraway has famously described situated knowledge as a “feminist empiricism” in the course of challenging the ideas of scientific “objectivity.”11

Despite the overwhelming power of scientific rationalism, often leveraged by bureaucratic administration, it remains possible to honor situated knowledge and apply it. It is, in any case, within us and omnipresent around us, but not readily recognized and trusted.

Deepen Communion with Nature

The great appeal of many commons is their invitation — often, in fact, a necessity — to bring people into closer communion with nature. In commons that revolve around natural biowealth — water, farmland, forests, fisheries, wild game — people quickly realize that there are natural limits. People involved in agroecology, permaculture, community forests, and traditional irrigation become closely attuned to the rhythms of natural systems and the subtle indicators of their health or endangerment.

Deepen communion with nature

In commons, people are not focused on the exchange value or financialization of so-called natural capital. The more they engage directly with nature, the more commoners develop intimate relationships of respect and understanding for the Earth as an elegant, sacred, living system. Commons give people practical vehicles for deepening their engagement with nature. When M. Kat Anderson asked native elders in California why some plants and animals were disappearing, they blamed “the absence of human interaction with a plant or an animal.” They suggested that people need an active relationship with plants because “not only do plants benefit from human use, but some may actually depend on humans using them. The conservation of endangered species and the restoration of historic ecosystems might require the reintroduction of careful human stewardship rather than simple hands-off preservation.”12 Indigenous wisdom suggests that human beings must interact with nature as consciously helpful users, protectors, and stewards. This idea is finding its way into some state policies. In Guatemala, the government had long attempted to stop cattle ranchers, farmers, illegal loggers, and drug traffickers from destroying lands in the Maya Biosphere Reserve. After concluding that it could not stop such behaviors, the government realized that “the most effective way to protect forests is to give control of them to the communities who already live there.”13

The same thing happened in Nepal, where community participation in the management of forests greatly improved ecological stewardship. Following the reintroduction of a multiparty system in Nepal in 1990, new policies and funding mechanisms were created to support grassroots-based, self-governing groups. In all, some 16,000 community forest user groups are now managing 1.2 million hectares of land, or about one fourth of Nepal’s forested areas.14

The point is not simply to develop economic or government policies that are more “sustainable.” The point is for people to have opportunities to deepen their relationships to natural systems, and in so doing, come to know them, love them, and protect them. This is the seed from which grows the structured situated knowing of permaculture and ecomimicry in design,15 among many other eco-friendly innovations. It is the “spell of the sensuous,” in David Abrams’s phrase, that pulls us toward a deeper understanding of the nature and ourselves.16 Ecophilosopher Andreas Weber argues our connections to nature are so deep and existential that our inner lives and feelings bear the imprint of the outer world. Living organisms experience themselves as physical matter via their emotions, which is part of a larger drama of biopoetic relationships among living creatures. “We are of the same stuff” as the world, writes Weber, which is why a walk through a meadow or the arrival of spring causes such delight.17 Deepening our communion with nature is an indispensable path toward responsible care of the teeming, living world that lies beyond humanity.

Preserve Relationships in Addressing Conflicts

Any cooperative endeavor will face serious challenges, many of them stemming from personal behaviors or power relations. The question is not if, but how the inevitable conflicts that arise will be dealt with. Ignoring them is not an option. What we mean by “preserving relationships” in addressing conflicts might be best explained by drawing on Elinor Ostrom’s insights.

Preserve relationships in addressing conflicts

Like any institution, a commons must have rules and norms that apply to everyone. But what also matters a great deal is how those rules and norms are upheld. There must be an honest, transparent reckoning of conflict or violation, but also a spirit of respect and concern for all the people involved. In some contexts people are not able to leave, which makes it a priority to try to preserve relationships while addressing conflicts. Hence the use of graduated sanctions, one of the eight design principles for commons identified by Elinor Ostrom. (See Appendix D.) It is important to recognize and rectify the harm, but also to honor the dignity of the person involved and their relationships with fellow commoners. Relationships can also be preserved when group complicity or systemic problems are acknowledged. The idea is not to secure consensus through threats of punishment, but to prevent misaligned relationships in the first place. When transgressions do occur, it is important to mete out sanctions in gradually increasing severity, all in a context of trust, candor, and honesty. A frequent technique is to sit in a circle and discuss a problematic situation or behavior. (We have seen effective deliberations in circles with more than one hundred people.) The art is to give everyone the right to be heard, bear witness, and suggest changes while sharing the observed problem and its implications transparently.

When one of us observed a large circle of members of the Venezuelan federation of cooperatives, Cecosesola, she was perplexed at how complaints against people were often commingled with affection, with meetings concluding by people hugging the “accused.” After what seemed to be a more than challenging session involving deep emotions and interpersonal conflicts, the expression of respect and conspicuous displays of hugs signaled that deep, honest criticism is linked to enduring respect and care. Other commons may use mediation or other forms of group deliberation. Many software commons have a choice that may or may not preserve relationships while addressing a dispute — the practice of “forking the code,” which in effect splits the project into separate endeavors. One or several participants to leave but still work on the same base of software code and take it in different creative directions. Of course, not all conflicts can be bridged. At some point, forking a project or excluding a person may be the only practical option. What always matters, though, is striving to maintain collective morale while being unflinchingly honest. Denial and self-deception don’t help anyone.

Reflect on Your Peer Governance

In many commons people are not fully aware of their own practices. The underlying values and social dynamics — both the constructive ones and the less helpful ones — may be only dimly perceived. This makes a commons vulnerable. Even engaged people may forget how to maintain themselves as a commons in the face of daily operational challenges, the necessity (and seductions) of making money, the enticements of wielding power, new ideas about organizational governance, and countless other factors. It is therefore vital that commoners reflect on their peer governance. That is the only way that they can protect the integrity of the commons against enclosure, cooptation, or the entropy that can sap institutions of their energy.

Reflect on your peer governance

We include this pattern, Reflect on Your Peer Governance, as part of the Social Life of Commoning and not as an issue of Peer Governance, because we regard it as a foundational necessity. German economist and commons scholar Johannes Euler has pointed out that just as there is no commons without commoning, so there is no commoning without peer governance. If you want your commons to survive decades or even centuries, governance behaviors must be made explicit and honestly discussed. Unself-conscious forms of commoning risk losing their way. Unless a group has centuries of tradition, culture, and ritual to act as stabilizing forces, its members must consciously reflect upon the processes that make a commons work or that could make it better.

* * *

In the end, commoning is not just a state of enhanced awareness and being, like Zen practice or mindfulness. It is an enactment of peer provisioning and peer governance. It is the condition and means by which those occur. We might add that it is the cultural form of a new kind of politics. At its most ambitious, commoning begins a process of re-imagining the terms of modern human civilization at a time when its idealized notion of human aspiration, homo economicus, is revealing itself to be profoundly antisocial, indifferent to democratic norms, and ecologically irresponsible.

This is why a vital aspect of the Social Life of Commoning is the idea of strengthening the Nested-I. This is not a pattern as such, because it represents what happens more generally when other patterns of commoning are enacted: our individual and collective interests converge and align! We enter into a symbiosis among individual beings and our larger context. Participants in the WikiHouse network enact the Nested-I as they share and make shareable their design innovations with each other. The use of open standards and modularity encourages anyone to contribute freely in building something bigger than themselves, while reaping individual benefits in the process. The idea of the Nested-I also animates federated wikis, which vest individuals with the autonomy to create personal wikis to suit their own tastes and points of view, while inscribing such wikis within larger federations (known as “neighborhoods”) to allow the easy sharing of wiki pages (see pp. 246–252).

The reality of the Nested-I is arguably that of the human species even if conventional economics continues to believe in the isolated-I as a sovereign, rational agent. What economics fails to comprehend is the biophysical absurdity of this foundational premise. Living beings are deeply and dynamically interconnected. Even Western medicine’s fixation on single-agent pathogens that supposedly have a cause/effect relationship with our bodies, is giving way to a more complicated story. Increasingly scientists are discovering that individual living systems are nested within larger living systems while at the same time being comprised of smaller living elements. It’s holism all the way up and down! The Human Microbiome Project has identified about 100 trillion nonhuman life forms — bacteria, fungi, etc. — that live within our bodies, especially in our digestive tract, taking up between two and five pounds of our body weight. It turns out that these organisms are essential to our health and well-being as “individuals.” One might say that our individual bodies don’t even have definitive boundaries; we are immersed in all sorts of symbiotic relationships to the food we eat, the bacteria around and within us, and the local landscape. In short, the Nested-I has a more than human dimension. We literally blur into a network of other living organisms and systems.18

This is what the idea of the Nested-I and its Ubuntu Rationality expresses: an individual’s actions not only serve his or her own interests, they are part of a larger, more intricate symphony of negotiation and change with other living beings in a living Earth. It bears noting that while this impulse to work with our fellow commoners may have elements of conscious choice, it is a fundamentally nonrational, embodied instinct as well. Strengthening the Nested-I means developing the space to express affection, respect, laughter, playfulness, passion, and love in the mundane chores of teamwork and ritualized togetherness that any commons must honor.19

It is also worth noting that a commons can get the mix of collective control and individualism wrong. A group may exert a suffocating presence on the individual, or on certain types of individuals. Patriarchy is a problem in many subsistence and digital commons despite women’s significant role in commoning. A coercive conformism can quickly turn a community into a cult. Charismatic leaders may get things done by consolidating power, but at the cost of a weaker, less robust culture. Nourishing the Nested-I requires an artful, respectful balance between the needs of the individual and the imperatives of the group.

5. Peer Governance Through Commoning

Commoning may be rooted in a variety of social outlooks and behaviors, as we saw in Chapter Four. But can it govern? Can it do so better than existing governments? Can it coordinate more effectively and better than the market? These are large questions that we will address at greater length in Part III. For now, we wish to examine how peer governance works within a commons. Property rights scholar Robert Ellickson has described how cattle ranchers in the Shasta Valley of California dealt with the problem of cattle escaping from their fields and trespassing on other people’s land. Ranchers on their own came up with informal rules and social norms — what Ellickson calls “order without law.”1 Neighboring ranchers, for example, often follow the tradition of splitting fifty/fifty the cost of building and maintaining a shared fence. Or they agree that one rancher will provide the materials and the other the labor for building it. Or if one rancher has a greater average density of livestock on one side of the fence, custom holds that there should be a rough norm of proportionality for allocating the costs of fencing. If a careless rancher violates the social norm of promptly retrieving stray cattle, the rancher community often intentionally uses gossip to sanction and shame them.

The dynamics of peer governance at the cellular level of everyday practices matter because they provide regularity and stability to a commons. They also help us learn how to devise larger structures such as federated commons, commons-friendly law and policy, infrastructures, and commons-public partnerships, as we will see in later chapters. Here, we explore ten dynamics of Peer Governance that tend to be present in effective commons. The first seven revolve around interpersonal and social relationships. The final three involve commons-based methods for dealing with property, money, and markets.

• Peer Governance
• Bring Diversity into Shared Purpose
• Create Semi-Permeable Membranes
• Honor Transparency in a Sphere of Trust
• Share Knowledge Generously
• Assure Consent in Decision Making
• Rely on Heterarchy
• Peer Monitor & Apply Graduated Sanctions

___________________

• Relationalize Property
• Keep Commons & Commerce Distinct
• Finance Commons Provisioning

A Few Words About Governance

In conventional parlance, governance generally means the rule of some over the many through government. Government exercises authority and control over people through laws passed by legislatures, rulings handed down by courts, and policies adopted by various officials and politicians. At the end of the day, most people regard government as something distant and often indifferent to their concerns. It is something that a group of people vested with power does to and for another group of people, perhaps with their participation and consent, perhaps not. But government and governance are different things. One could say, there is governance in the commons, but no government.

As we thought about how coordination works in a commons, we hesitated to use the term “governance” because it is so closely associated with the idea of collective interests overriding individual freedom. This perceived antagonism runs so deep that it is hard to imagine any serious resolution of the tension. But there is a resolution — to realize individual needs by addressing collective needs. The supposed dualism between the collective and individual is largely overcome by sharing authority among everyone directly affected by decisions. Authority, power, and responsibility for implementation are diffused among identifiable people, each of whom has opportunities to deliberate and make decisions with others.

That is why we like to refer to peer governance rather than just governance. It points to an ongoing process of dialogue, coordination, and self-organization. By recognizing individuals as active peers in a collective process rather than positioning them as adversaries competing to control a large, remote third party, government, a more trusted type of governance can emerge. Citizens in a nation-state may nominally be sovereign (“We the People …”), but that sovereignty is delegated with only crude oversight and accountability to representative legislatures and rigid, formalistic bureaucracies. No wonder the state is seen as alien or hostile! In a commons, governance is more likely to take account of on-the-ground needs and realities.

Peer Governance amounts to an artful political dialectic between culture and structure. The shared motivations and visions that commoners wish to enact must have sufficient structure in law, formal organization, and finance to be protected and nurtured. But there must also be sufficient open space for individual creativity, deliberation, and action to flourish, which in turn recursively improves the structures of law, organization, and finance that guide a commons forward. For a commons to be coherent and durable, it needs some clear organizational forms and regularities. For it to be resilient and alive, it requires welcoming space for free play, flexibility, and creative novelty. One might say that the informal and the creative must be stabilized through friendly structural support and constraints, without being controlled by them. Commoners must figure out a Goldilocks zone in which the interplay between structure and culture is “just right.”2

Getting the interplay right is the high art of commons governance. To illuminate it, we present in this chapter the generic patterns of Peer Governance that help a commons work well. How does self-organization occur in the first place and ripen into a stable, creative social organism? Is there a general developmental process that needs to occur? We don’t believe there is, but there are patterns we can become aware of that will help us understand how a commons can maintain itself. It would be a mistake to offer prescriptive formulas for Peer Governance because they won’t work in complex systems. You cannot fabricate a commons simply by assembling a certain number of people, adopting certain values, and applying certain operational rules and enforcement strategies. Following the eight design principles famously put forward by Elinor Ostrom is helpful,3 but ultimately not enough. The principles do not provide sufficient guidance for people to respond flexibly to feedback in dynamic systems. Our analysis of Peer Governance therefore moves beyond Ostrom’s landmark design principles in several ways. First, we look at all sorts of contemporary commons — social, digital, and urban, among others — not just at natural resource-based commons. We also attempt to go beyond resource management and allocation as primarily economic matters, and instead emphasize commoning as a social system. Any assessment of governance in commons must deal squarely with the systemic threats posed by markets and state power, so we look to Peer Governance as a form of moral and political sovereignty that works in counterpoint to the market/state.

Enacting Peer Governance needs to be a living, developmental process in itself. Therefore, instead of offering a full set of prescriptive formulas, our patterns amount to procedural guidelines that enable a stepwise, adaptable path for developing a commons. Enacting a commons through Peer Governance resembles the way in which DNA provides general guidance, but not strict instructions, for the autonomous development and differentiation of an embryo.

So, the bad news is that there is no blueprint, no panacea. Peer Governance is not a prescriptive, rule-driven program for fabricating commons or managing resources. But the good news is that Peer Governance is a generative process. It is a reliable means by which commoners can build authentic, living relationships among themselves, and in so doing, develop a coherent, stable commons.

This idea is consistent with Christopher Alexander’s ideas about how to create enlivening environments that last. Alexander has written that a process that generates life must itself be a living process. It is “the ONLY way, I believe — that it is possible to generate buildings or communities that have life. Living structure … cannot be created by brute force from designs. It can only come from a generative program — hence from a generative process existing in the production process of society — so that … its conception, plan, design, detailed layout, structural design, and material detail are all unfolded, step by step in TIME.”4 (emphasis in original)

Formal structures are obviously needed, but living processes, which have their own regularities, lie at the heart of a commons. Commoning is the exploratory process by which people identify their needs and devise situation-specific systems for provisioning and governance. People are empowered to draw upon their own knowledge in assessing their problems. They must live with ambiguities and uncertainties, and show the creative agency to develop solutions that seem fair and effective to them.

Peer Governance is open ended. Its properties and implementation cannot be fully known or specified in advance. This idea obviously flies in the face of modern sensibilities, which generally try to design comprehensive, advance blueprints for implementation. The primary goals in modern systems are uniformity and simplicity, for the sake of controllability and political credibility. James Scott, in his book Seeing Like a State, provides a brilliant analysis of how this plays out in the exercise of state power. As a precondition for efficient control, modern systems look to previously defined indices, development metrics, and expert knowledge. Formal categories of thought and official policies tend to take on a life of their own, becoming more real than on-the-ground realities.

An example is the European Union’s requirement that its member states keep their budget deficits below three percent of gross domestic product, ostensibly to assure that governments are prudently managing their economies. It turns out that this magical budget number had been invented by two French civil servants in 1981.5 French President François Mitterrand, looking for ways to keep his government’s budget deficits under control, had asked his budget department to come up with a simple but economically credible rule to help rein in government spending. Mitterand reportedly had asked the staffers to propose “a kind of rule, something simple [that exudes] competence in economics.” Two staffers came up with the idea of budget deficits at or below three percent of GDP as a rough metric of fiscal responsibility. One of the two explained, “At the time, we were headed to a 100-billion-franc deficit. That corresponded to about 2.6 percent of GDP. So we said to ourselves: 1 percent deficit would be too tough and would be unattainable. Two percent would have put too much pressure on the government. So we said three percent.”

In other words, the budget deficit criterion was purely circumstantial, with no basis in theory or substance. Indeed, former Bundesbank president Hans Tietmeyer has confirmed that the three percent benchmark is “not easy to justify … in economic terms.” However, after its success in reining in French deficits over a few years, the EU decided to adopt it as well. Despite having no theoretical basis, the three percent benchmark has ripened into a hard-and-fast symbol of fiscal rectitude over the past thirty years. The number was enshrined in the Treaty of Maastricht that formed the European Union in 1992, and is routinely cited by conservative politicians and economists in countless pronouncements. But only three member states have actually met this standard between 1999 and 2015,6 suggesting how easily official (and, in this case, fabricated) indicators can override people’s situated knowledge and capacity to respond.

Commons and Peer Governance must be grown over time and deal with countless uncertainties that cannot be fully predicted in advance. This requires time for a culture of trust and transparency to emerge and yield a network of relationships. Rituals must be invented, and habits must ripen into traditions. It is therefore critical for commoners to consciously decide how to craft their governance systems.

This process is neither random nor precise. And yet, it has certain regularities. It is more akin to the method for making an outdoor fire: there is no single, universally correct way of doing it, but certain developmental steps must be followed, and in a certain order. One must first collect flammable materials of various sizes — logs, kindling, tinder — and arrange them so that the easily ignited tinder is on the bottom, which in turn will help ignite the larger pieces. A spark must be produced through a match, flame, or other means. There must be a bounded container for the fire (a fireplace, a ring of rocks, a hibachi), and sufficient oxygen flow and venting. The specifics of building a fire vary in a northern forest, where wood is plentiful, compared to a desert, where flammable fuel is scarce. And of course, the results — a roaring bonfire, a fire suitable for cooking, slow-burning embers — will vary, too. The point is that despite the many ways in which fires can be made, and the different outcomes, the basic patterns remain the same.

So, too, with the process of establishing Peer Governance: there are some reliable general patterns, but many idiosyncratic ways of doing it. Commons usually start with motivations or aspirations shared by participants — the need of farmers to irrigate their crops, the desire of software programmers to have an easy-to-use, shareable mapping program, the need of fishers to ensure fair access to a fishery.

Whatever the specific problem, a would-be commons must offer a credible vision for addressing it among people who often have different perspectives. Even though there may be no actual strategies or solutions in hand, a commons in its early stage must provide a spark and updraft that feeds interest and motivation. If people feel that the process resonates with their needs and context, they will be eager to engage. However, there must be an attractor that pulls them to self-organize and align their intentions and actions.7 This could be the need to survive, the desire to reconnect with local ecosystems, an attractive alternative to extractive markets, the appeal of fair-minded cooperation, or any other number of factors.

Patterns of Peer Governance

In our analytical wanderings through the wealth of commons, we’ve identified ten patterns of Peer Governance. They not only help establish more trusted, transparent systems of deliberation and coordination. They explain the functional effectiveness of commons as governance systems, especially in contrast to the market and nation-state. When a commons works well, it is generally because people are able to diffuse authority and responsibility and prevent abusive concentrations of power. Peer Governance encourages open, frequent sharing of knowledge so that the best ideas and collective wisdom can surface. Defined systems of monitoring, sanctions, and enforcement are needed to protect the commons against free riders, vandals, and systematic enclosures.

Most importantly, commoners must find ways to prevent individual property rights and the quest for money from ruining group dynamics. That is why it is necessary for commoners to develop ways to relationalize property — a topic that we will explore in Chapter 8. A similar set of governance challenges arise in dealings with markets and capital. No commons can survive if commercial norms are allowed to colonize the commons, so Peer Governance strives to Keep Commons & Commerce Distinct.

Let’s explore each pattern more deeply.

Bring Diversity into Shared Purpose

A commons is not simply a group of like-minded people who somehow discover each other, or a cohort of well-intentioned people willing to be educated. It is a social system that can only be developed through many acts of relationship-building and deliberation over time. People almost always have all sorts of different ideas and motivations, if only because personalities and backgrounds vary. Peer Governance, artfully carried out, brings diverse viewpoints together. There is no substitute for this process because, without it, people may casually commit to some imagined, abstract idea about the future that may not reflect their actual feelings, needs, and feasible possibilities.

Bring Diversity into Shared Purpose

This is a core insight among the Indigenous and non-Indigenous organizations that established Unitierra — Universidad de la Tierra en Oaxaca — in Oaxaca, Mexico. It is a “de-institutionalized university” founded by commoners for commoners that rejects formal roles and hierarchy.8 Unitierra’s founders regard the idea of shared purpose and objectives as unhelpful; what matters is shared action. In a real commons, says Gustavo Esteva, intellectual father and elder of Uniterra, people often have shared reasons to act and to act together, but initially they may not have a shared purpose. At Unitierra, people avoid trying to “pull from the future”9 by declaring in advance an imagined idea of where they want to go. Instead they try to “push from the base and from the past,” by drawing upon everyone’s experiences and motivations.

Through commoning, a shared purpose eventually emerges. It is not necessarily self-evident or knowable in advance. An intentional community may have shared purpose and values from the very start, but in most cases a motley group of people find each other and teach themselves how to walk, run, and then dance. The process may be easier if people live in a shared space or depend upon the same river or forest. Sharing the same aspirations — to boost crop yields, to improve local exchange and mutualization, to keep information shareable — can also quicken a spirit of cooperation and solidarity. In any case shared purpose is not a given in a commons. But we believe that it must be identified and clarified if effective action is to follow.

Henry David Thoreau, the American essayist and poet, described this process nicely: “If you have built your castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” While this is often taken as fanciful idealism, it is actually an apt description of how a vision is set forth and then made real by the hard work of bringing different people into general agreement. The core task is to respect the individuality of diverse members while forging an ethic of solidarity. This insight is critical because a commons, like any ecosystem, needs a requisite variety for it to function well.

Create Semi-Permeable Membranes

Commons need protection, as we love to say. Scholars have confirmed from extensive field research the need for what they call boundaries. The first of Ostrom’s famous eight design principles for successful commons is “clearly defined boundaries,” which are needed to delineate the boundaries of the resource system and the membership of the commons. While agreeing with this general idea that boundaries are essential to stewardship, we believe that a better term is “semi-permeable membrane.” After all, the point is not to establish a hermetically closed system that can exclude everyone else and hoard resources for members only — the goal of property law and “club goods” (as economists would put it). The point is to exclude influences that undermine Ubuntu Rationality in a commons while remaining open to the flows of energy and life that create value in a commons and sustain it.

Create Semi-Permeable Membranes

So commoners must somehow learn to deal with a paradox — to protect against capitalist threats to enclose common wealth while at the same time taking nourishment from the rich diversity of life. Commoners achieve this deft trick by creating semi-permeable membranes around themselves, much as any living organisms does. Unlike strict boundaries, semi-permeable membranes selectively allow what may or may not enter a commons, much as we choose the food and relationships that nourish us. A commons must remain open to all the external nutrients that might deepen the whole.

This is central to the ability of commons to generate a new system of value that it can safeguard and grow. If capitalism is based upon accumulating and centralizing wealth, commons rely on their semi-permeable membranes to be able to interact safely with the larger world. They capture and store flows of energy in “catchment areas,” to use the language of permaculture. Joline Blais, a media scholar and permaculture designer, writes:

Catchment is a system for accumulating a critical mass of a needed resource, like water or soil or minerals, in order to trigger self-organizing systems, i.e., life forms, that then spread over the landscape. Some natural examples of catchment include the sun, plants, carbohydrates, bodies of water, geothermal energy, and plate tectonics.15

Life arises when there are sufficient flows of energy. That is what commons attempt to do — create catchment areas for the self-organization of life. So instead of conceiving of commons as closed systems of common property managed by a “club,” it is more productive to see them as social organisms who, thanks to their semi-permeable membranes, can interact with larger forces of life — communities, ecosystems, other commons.

This resembles the functioning of the blood-brain barrier as it separates the blood circulating in our bodies from brain fluid in the central nervous system. The blood-brain barrier allows the passage of water, some gases, and lipid-soluble molecules, and the selective transport of molecules such as glucose and amino acids that are crucial to neural function. But — and this is critical — it prevents the passage of potential neurotoxins into the brain.

Any commons requires a similarly effective membrane to allow the passage of beneficial substances while screening out “neurotoxins” that could harm its healthy functioning. The social impact of money in a community — who benefits from it, the purposes for which it is used, the distortion of relationships it may engender — is perhaps the most potentially troubling force in a commons. (See Keep Commons and Commerce Distinct, pp. 151–155.) Living in a capitalist society, it is often impossible to simply withdraw from the power of money and market relationships. A semi-permeable membrane can help a commons prevent markets from colonizing and destroying it. It helps commoners protect their living wealth (not commodified wealth) in efficient ways.

Honor Transparency in a Sphere of Trust

You might say that there are two kinds of transparency — the legal kind that liberal democracies require to ensure official accountability, and the real transparency that can happen only when people know and trust each other. Real transparency is not just about official accountability based on formal authority and protocols — “covering your ass” in a bureaucratic sense. It’s about personal disclosure and sharing one’s authentic feelings. When a difficult decision must be made in combat, for example, or if a top general gives an order that subordinates regard as problematic, whom should they obey — their official superior in the chain of command or their close colleagues whom they know and trust? In politics and bureaucracies, transparency is often more of a formal charade than a candid sharing of knowledge because anything disclosed can and will be used against you. Minimally acceptable disclosure is therefore the norm.

Honor Transparency in a Sphere of Trust

Real transparency is more meaningful precisely because it penetrates the veneer of formal roles and rules. And it is one of the reasons why commoning is not only challenging, but also transformative in a very deep, personal way. Stefan Brunnhuber, a prominent economist and clinical therapist, argues that cultural transformations cannot be properly understood or achieved through conventional rational-discursive approaches alone. Brunnhuber notes that “trying to reduce complexity through, say, more transparency [information disclosures alone] or the simplification of procedures, will be of little use.” What is required is “a different psychosocial practice.”16
Commoning is such a practice. It allows us to deal with the fact that transparency cannot just be organized, it has to be felt. It won’t suffice to rely on organizational forms or disclosures to address matters of the heart and culture. Or, as Brunnhuber puts it, “We have to deal with complexity emotionally.”17 This is also true for the complexity of commoning. This insight helps us see once again the ongoing dialogue that must occur between organizational structure and culture. In the end, we cannot depend upon structures to do the work of culture. Transparency is not just about legal arrangements and procedures, but about social practices that build trust.18

The Cecosesola network of cooperatives in Venezuela cultivates a culture of such deep trust that people are willing to express and receive sharp criticisms while showing great respect and affection for one another (see page 185–187). This sort of Transparency in a Sphere of Trust is essential. It is the only way that reliable information can be elicited —
some of it embarrassing — while sustaining solid personal relationships. A commons needs truly honest judgments and wisdom, not just formal professionalism.

Of course, in most groups and networks there is also misbehavior and social cliques that can make it difficult or impossible to create serious trust, let along be open and transparent. Also small group size by itself is not a guarantee of trust or transparency. But in combination with other patterns of Peer Governance — such as Share Knowledge Generously and Rely on Heterarchy — commoning can succeed more consistently. Commoning can be consistently success.

Share Knowledge Generously

The sharing of knowledge (or its objectified cousin, information) seen in all commons is not just a nice thing to do. It is a crucial instrument by which people generate a social order of their own. That’s how online communities, for example, develop free and open source software. Christopher Kelty, a cultural historian of this demimonde, argues that we must go beyond the simple-minded claim that “sharing is a natural condition of human life.” The story is far more interesting, he notes: “Sharing produces its own kind of moral and technical order, that is, ‘information makes people want freedom’ and how they want it is related to how that information is created and circulated.”19 (our emphasis)

Honor Transparency in a Sphere of Trust

Early projects to develop shared bodies of code — such as the UNIX operating system that eventually became Linux — show how sharing of knowledge is generative in its own right. Complex social systems gradually emerge as information is shared. Kelty writes: “The fact that geeks are wont to speak of ‘the UNIX philosophy’ means that UNIX is not just an operating system but a way of organizing the complex relations of life and work through technical means …”20 UNIX and Linux are artifacts of a generative relational economy.

The specific circuits by which knowledge is shared define the character of a commons. The diversity of contributors, their know-how and ways of knowing, the criteria for validating these, the methods by which people absorb and use explicit and tacit knowledge — these things matter. Different commons do it differently, of course. The most familiar form of knowledge sharing is surely the meeting, or in larger groups, the general assembly. We have seen how Cecosesola reinvented meetings as loosely structured get-togethers that are occasions for both social bonding and knowledge-sharing. However meetings are structured, the point is to share insights with the group easily and widely so that wise collective choices can be identified and adopted. This includes choices about how to stint resource use and allocate benefits.

In settings where people cannot know each other (group size matters) many commoners gather and share information through a process known as “stigmergy,” a kind of situated information sharing that provides “both the stimulus and instruction for further work.”21 The Greek roots of the word “stigmergy” mean “to incite to work”; the idea is a key concept used by complexity science to describe how simple rules in distributed systems can yield a formidable collective intelligence. Think of ants as they go searching for food. They mark their paths with pheromones — that is, they leave a trace, an informational signal — so that their fellow ants can follow the pheromone-marked paths to find food. Stigmergy provides a way for various discoveries to be shared widely and quickly, stimulating prompt follow-on responses and distributed self-organization, with no need for centralized direction. Termites use stigmergic learning and coordination to build their complex nests without any designer or supervisor. Coordination occurs horizontally, asynchronously, and irregularly as individual termites share information and immediately adapt their behaviors.

Stigmergy is a way to diffuse information, decisions, and responsibility to a larger, diverse pool of people, which then enhances effective sense making, learning, and action, even though everyone is spatially separated. For contributors to Wikipedia, the famous red links you find in many Wikipedia entries — the ones you click on only to find out that there is nothing yet written about the topic — signal that more information is needed. They are an invitation to supply it. A simple signal encourages stigmergic coordination on a massive scale, resulting in a complex body of writings — the Wikipedia pluriverse.

Or consider the peer coordination of volunteers for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. After a natural disaster strikes, such as the Haiti earthquake in 2014, tech volunteers scramble to create detailed online maps to help first responders locate sources of water, food, and medical care.22 One person’s nugget of information or clever map improvement is shared with others, which starts a cascade of follow-on enhancements. People of many different talents living in different spots around the world soon produce a digital map that is often more accurate and more rapidly produced than maps produced by teams of professionals.

The challenge for Peer Governance is to ensure that information and knowledge can flow widely and often — and with minimal resistance. This creates social circuits of communication and coordination that, over time, propel the emergence of a commons-based order.

Assure Consent in Decision Making

It is fundamental that commoners have a meaningful say in developing the rules by which they shall be governed. The ways people directly participate vary greatly, of course, but at the very least, commoners must be able to register their views about Peer Governance and consent to the decisions made. This pattern resembles Ostrom’s third design principle: “Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules.”23

Assure Consent in Decision Making

In small groups, discussion and conversation in a circle are the customary practices for making decisions. This approach is used in the panchayat, or village councils, of India, which manage community forests or farmland. Some commons may be largely directed by governing committees or coordinating staff, and thus have less direct participation. Examples include the boards of open-access scholarly journals such as the Public Library of Science, the management of timebanks, some community supported agriculture (CSA) farms, and the foundations directly associated with open source software projects. Yet even commons with some form of central management are generally mindful of the need to consult with those affected by decisions.

One way by which commoners assent to rules is by upholding traditions. Customary practices amount to a kind of “blanket consent.” This might not always be progressive, but it has the capacity to build the rules of Peer Governance into the very culture. Farmers who irrigate their fields in Bali, for example, have addressed the complexities of pest outbreaks and water shortages by observing religious rituals on specific dates. Under subak24 irrigation practices (subak means “irrigation community”), peasants coordinate their rice farming by observing certain rituals. They plant rice at different times to avert too much demand on water and thus shortages, but they harvest rice at the same time, minimizing pest proliferation. The syncing of social and religious practices with ecological timing functions as a kind of collective consent-and-coordination system.25 Priests at water temples oversee water management practices, interpreting the Tri Hita Karana philosophy that integrates the relationships among people, the Earth, and the divine. What strikes the Western mind as religious conservatism or odd cultural traditions produces an exquisitely coordinated solution to ecological problems. Interestingly, decisions are not really being “taken” — they are the result of a customary process.

But in many contexts, an explicit decision-taking process is needed. And in these contexts, what matters as much as the process are the criteria by which decisions are finally justified. While it is often assumed that consensus is the ideal way to go in the commons, or that everybody has to agree to everything, this type of harmony doesn’t necessarily exist. In fact, this notion of consensus is something of a caricature. Disagreement is a reality of human existence. And even when consensus can be achieved, it is not the same as unanimity. Small groups can strive for unanimity, or they can apply a “unanimity minus one” or “unanimity minus two” rule (meaning, a decision to act despite one or two dissents). But it bears noting that these procedures of decision making are not limited to small groups. In large commons, it can be complicated to make decisions about indivisible resources with sharply divided majority/minority factions. However, the Sociocracy methodology (see box on p. 140–141) has proven very useful in surfacing tacit objections and concerns, and moving discussion to a more substantive level in an orderly, fair way.

What enhances the chances of success in any commons, small or big, is to reject at the outset the winners and losers scheme — the big structural flaw of majority rule, otherwise known as democratic voting. Majority rule generally requires support from more than fifty percent of those eligible to vote. If 49.99 percent disagree, too bad; 50.01 percent is good enough to prevail. No wonder representative democracies based on this assumption have trouble healing deep divides or securing cooperation from the losing minority. No wonder ideologies arise to sharpen the differences among parties rather than find common ground. Relying on competitive voting framed by a win/lose choice cannot help but yield this outcome. Decisions by plurality, where the largest bloc in a group prevails even if it falls short of a majority, has the same basic deficiency.26

But how then to avoid the winners and losers scheme? How to make sure that all those who have a stake agree to go along with a certain course of action, without feeling coerced or manipulated? And more subtly, how to design decision making in such a way that it doesn’t end up creating, and then suppressing, frustrations — which are so often channeled into all sorts of secondary aggression?

As mentioned above, it is crucial that any decision-making process encourage open discussion and actively elicit people’s deeper, often unstated concerns. The process-designs can be diverse, but they must all allow for collaborative proposal building so that people can refine ideas and action proposals. A number of models have been developed along these lines, including the Quaker-based model and the hand signals famously used by Occupy protesters in their group negotiations.27 Now that the internet is everywhere and software has become quite sophisticated, it is possible, for the first time in history, for strangers on a global scale to enter into such collaborative decision making. Digital platforms offer a great deal of versatility in structuring how people can interact. They can have asynchronous communication and use tiered procedures for moderation, deliberation, voting, and so forth. One of the major infrastructures for facilitating such a process is Loomio.

The designers of Loomio, the Enspiral cooperative based in New Zealand, purposely avoided a hierarchical decision-making format. They wanted a process that allows people to deliberate and come to agreement, with decisions emerging from the bottom up. However, because collective processes are sometimes dominated by vocal factions who marginalize other people and perspectives, Loomio was designed to give people plenty of opportunities to express alternative and dissenting opinions. As Richard Bartlett put it:

The added value of Loomio is that the deliberation and the conclusion are displayed side by side [on the computer screen]. The disagreement is visualized through a pie chart, in a way that you must pay attention to it, so that the concerns can be resolved. This is the difference with polls and other voting mechanisms: you can change your mind as you discuss the proposal. So it becomes almost like a game, participants have to work through the concerns and get them to change.28

Loomio does not allow a group to entertain multiple proposals at once because the idea is to force the group, at a certain point of an ongoing discussion, to give its undivided attention to a single pending proposal and come to a final decision. This might be regarded as a design limitation because at a certain point the platform shuts off simultaneous consideration of other proposals. On the other hand, Loomio’s minimalist yet adaptable design lets a group make its own choices about how to deliberate and decide — including with majority rule — while documenting the arguments that people present.

It is certainly true that there is no single best way of decision making. What is critical is choosing the right process, criteria, and tools (or combinations of them) for each specific context. Two basic distinctions are important in shaping policies to Assure Consent in Decision Making. The first is the distinction between consensus and consent. The second is the distinction between common criteria and voting.

To give my consent to a proposal does not necessarily mean that the proposal is my first choice. I might simply wish to cooperate with the group and not stand in the way. I might not have a better proposal or I may hope that others won’t insist on their personal preferences next time as I didn’t this time. Sometimes commoners choose to use a relaxed threshold. They frame the vote with a question like this: “Is this proposal something you can live with?” Such an approach can help to achieve full consent, which again does not mean that everyone is in full agreement.

Consent — as opposed to agreement — is defined by the absence of reasonable objections. The basic assumption is that people tend to have good reasons for disagreeing with something and that there has to be a place and space for airing these reasons. In other words, “Consent deliberately seeks objections, which reveals wisdom that can be used to improve proposals and agreements.”29 Consent is reached by choosing the proposal with the least objections. The lowest level of objection — resistance — results in the highest acceptance. James Priest, cofounder of the Sociocracy 3.0 practice, writes: “Consensus is seeking to find the best decision for the purpose. Consent decision making is seeking to find a good enough decision that can then be tried out, tested, and improved over time.”30

One method that relies on “good enough” decisions is called Systemic Consensing, which could well be considered one of the backbones of Peer Governance. Systemic Consensing was created in 2005 by Austrian physician and mathematician Erich Visotschnig. The system invites participants to rate multiple proposals on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 (no resistance at all) meaning, “I have no objection, I support this proposal strongly,” and 10 (maximum resistance) meaning, “I have huge objections. I utterly reject this proposal.” The in-between values of 2 to 9 are chosen based on the subjective judgment of each individual. A context-specific “zero option” is usually included to signify “keep everything as it is” or “let’s decide next time.” This option can be considered as the “limit of reasonability.” No proposal can be accepted by the group if it is ranked lower than this zero option.

Whoever uses the Systemic Consensus Principle will appreciate that each proposal is not only taken into account, but stays in the game until the very end of the process. Anyone can express objections to any of the proposals throughout the entire process.33 Digital platforms such as Systemic Konsensing (Consensus) (http://konsensieren.eu/en) allow large numbers of people around the globe to systematically consent to proposals, without spending too much time discussing them face-to-face or feeling disconnected from the center of decision making, because such a center doesn’t exist.

Beyond the distinction between consensus and consent, a second helpful distinction for guiding decision making in the commons is that of common criteria versus voting. Common criteria are, for instance, general standards of ethics and practice that people can agree upon to guide their decision making. They are an attractive alternative to voting because people may prefer to spend their time getting the work done rather than debating complex proposals and voting on them.

In the federation of Cecosesola cooperatives (See pp. 185–187.), there is no representational system or voting to make decisions, but instead open get-togethers and circles that allow everyone’s voice to be heard and everyday needs to be discussed. Hundreds of operational decisions are taken every day, many of them requiring sound judgment, such as how to deal with the lack of medications in the hospital or whether to suspend normal procedures because producers arrived with big loads of vegetables six hours earlier than expected. And yet, they never vote because they don’t want to split into a majority and a minority. People’s decisions are guided by the common criteria that Cecosesola participants have developed for all sorts of everyday situations. “In the end, the decision itself can be made by one, two, or three people. One of the common criteria is that whoever makes a decision in the end is also responsible for the decision and for communicating it.”34 Noel Vale Valera explained: “We never expect to make decisions together in our assemblies. We just talk a lot about how a decision can come about and according to which criteria.” His colleague Lizeth adds: “It has been working for decades. Of course, it isn’t easy. After all, we’re a group of 1,300 people. But we don’t have to discuss everything together,” adding that members are confident that others will make appropriate choices reflecting group sentiment.

Agreeing to common criteria of decision making — instead of making common decisions through voting — requires, and brings about, a culture of trust and solidarity. Such trust-based, routine delegations of individual decision making based on common criteria open up flexible, reliable ways of assuring commoners’ consent while empowering individuals with the freedom to make their own judgments in a given situation. It is not a one hundred percent rational process, but rather one driven by people’s feelings and intuitive sense that group members can be trusted to do the right thing in most cases.

Rely on Heterarchy

Unlike centralized and hierarchical structures, commons tend to function as heterarchies. A hierarchy assigns people to clearly defined formal roles in a pyramid-shaped organizational chart and divides groups into progressively smaller categories and subcategories. It is a more rigid, rank-driven order,35 in which power is consolidated and formally structured.

Rely on Heterarchy

Heterarchy brings together top-down and bottom-up (both hierarchical), and peer-to-peer dynamics. One can think of it as reconciling distributed networks and hierarchies.36 It has the potential to bring into alignment responsible individual autonomy and the need for multilevel governance (hence some sort of hierarchy). A heterarchy allows people to make their own choices in how they will interact, making the system more flexible and adaptable than conventional hierarchies.37 It tends to have unranked horizontal relationships of power and authority among participants, which enables the role of individual agents within the system to be reconfigured in multiple ways. While there are hierarchical elements in a heterarchy (the two systems of organization are not polar opposites), a heterarchy allows the same group of elements to be conjoined or divided in any number of ways. A hierarchy is a pyramid of rigidly prescribed power relations; a heterarchy allows power to flow dynamically through multiple and changing nodes in a social network.

As we saw in Cecosesola, participants operating in a culture of trust and responsibility do not necessarily need formal, advance permission to do something. The open source software ethic encourages this attitude in countless fields: if you see a bug, if you have a great idea, if an urgent problem needs attention, you are authorized in advance to take action. There may be subsequent reviews and second-guessing, and even reversals of such decisions. But experience has shown that individual initiative, when linked up with larger swarms of such actions, is amazingly reliable and effective in achieving results. One need not rely on formal representation or delegation to tackle complex, sophisticated tasks. Transparency in a Sphere of Trust, knowledge sharing, and networked relationships are far more adaptive.

Mainstream observers usually regard governance in a heterarchy with astonished disbelief. When Occupy Wall Street protesters organized their community in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote: “The protesters are dazzling in their Internet skills, and impressive in their organization. The square is divided into a reception area, a media zone, a medical clinic, a library, and a cafeteria. The protesters’ website includes links allowing supporters anywhere in the world to go online and order pizzas (vegan preferred) from a local pizzeria that delivers them to the square.”38 Yet there was no central executive directing this improvised social order. Drawing upon knowledge of previous forms of peer organization, it emerged on-the-fly as participants identified what needed to be done, and then coordinated their initiatives with others’.

We all recognize the desire to collaborate on shared endeavors and take them to larger, more versatile levels; that is arguably the history of the human species. We also know that spontaneous, peer-to-peer forms of organization often don’t endure. The challenge for our time — when the market/state has captured and controlled so many forms of cooperation — is to devise new structures that can protect and extend the cooperative impulse. We believe the patterns of the Triad of Commoning can assist and enact these structures within a protected commons. Peer Governance can not only achieve things quickly and effectively; it minimizes social castes, bureaucratic administration, and inequality. A rough equality is more achievable in a heterarchy because, as the Wikipedia entry on heterarchy notes, the structure enables “the flexibility of formal relationships inside an organization. Domination and subordination links can be reversed and privileges can be redistributed in each situation.” It continues:

[H]eterarchies divide and unite groups variously, according to multiple concerns that emerge or recede from view according to perspective. Crucially, no one way of dividing a heterarchical system can ever be a totalizing or all-encompassing view of the system; each division is clearly partial, and in many cases, a partial division leads us, as perceivers, to a feeling of contradiction that invites a new way of dividing things.39

What may seem counterintuitive to twentieth-century organizations is — in the age of ubiquitous digital networks and frequent bottom-up emergence — a perfectly functional structure of Peer Governance.

Peer Monitor & Apply Graduated Sanctions

No commons can survive long if it does not ensure that its members adhere to the rules that they have agreed to. In the jargon of social science, if anyone can simply free ride on a commons’ work or unilaterally defect from agreements, then the shared wealth will soon be depleted and the community will disintegrate. Sanctions are an important way of deterring such anti-social behaviors, and therefore must be part of any robust Peer Governance scheme.

Peer Monitor & Apply Graduated Sanctions

But what should the sanctions be, and how should they be applied? There is a vast literature exploring this topic, sometimes in the Ostrom school of scholarship, sometimes in the economic subdiscipline of prisoner’s dilemma experiments and game theory. Various experiments and theories have been put forward that attempt to explain how and why people defect from agreements, and what responses might induce greater cooperation.

Ostrom herself found out that long-enduring commons tend to have a series of graduated sanctions. “Graduated” refers to the fact that penalties start out small — a warning, a call to do better — and, if necessary, become more severe. Sanctions are needed to help persuade everyone else to stick to the rules because, as she points out, “enforcement increases the confidence of individuals that they are not suckers.”40 She calls this “quasi-voluntary compliance,” citing Margaret Levi, noting that cooperation is contingent on people seeing that others are also following the rules. Like paying one’s taxes, people are willing to do something they would prefer to avoid, but only when others comply as well. In most cases, some threat of coercion is essential to achieve cooperation. But it makes a huge difference if this threat of coercion comes from within and with consent — as in a Peer Governance process — or as an imperative from outside.

What is interesting is that the mere existence of possible sanctions is often effective in itself, even if actual penalties are rare. If there is already a great deal of solidarity in a commons, the social consequences of breaking the rules can be severe. Breaches are therefore quite rare. The mere existence of monitoring may not be as important as who is actually doing the monitoring — i.e., a friend or neighbor whom you do not wish to alienate. Sanctions generally play a less significant role in commons because, as Michael Cox et al. have noted in the case of a water management system in Zimbabwe, “people prefer to spend more time negotiating consensus than establishing and imposing sanctions.”41 In the English Lake District described by James Rebanks, it is considered a shocking breach of social honor if someone misleads another shepherd or sells a sheep for an inflated price. The zanjera irrigation communities of the Philippines reduce the burdens of enforcement by prescreening prospective members, and by suspending or even expelling anyone caught violating the rules.42 For socially cohesive commons, it seems, sanctions may be important tools but ones that are seldom used. For commons based on casual, informal relationships where full trust cannot be developed —
digital communities come to mind — sanctions may play a more necessary role.

—— Peer Governance and The Cash Nexus ——–

We cluster the next three patterns of Peer Governance together because they have a special focus — protecting the commons from the risks posed by money, property, finance, and market activity and the calculative rationality associated with them. These patterns attempt to safeguard the Nested-I, Ubuntu Rationality, and other dimensions of commoning while allowing necessary interactions with the cash nexus.

Relationalize Property

As they come and go from their houses every day, many Germans are reminded that their relationships with property are ambiguous. Craftsmen in the early Middle Ages often inscribed a bit of traditional wisdom on the facades of countless homes: “This is mine but is not mine. Nor does it belong to the one who had it before me. It’s not his, nor mine. He went out, I came in. And after me, it will be the same thing.” The conundrum of property is that all sorts of things may be “owned” as a matter of law, but what really matters are their possession and use — and both of those rights are grounded in social relations.

Relationalize Property

The Relationalize Property pattern is all about recognizing this reality. It means that the care-wealth of a commons does not belong exclusively to one person, nor even to a well-defined group. It has origins that precede us and will likely survive beyond our lives. But much as homo economicus is a caricature of what human beings really are, so property law has been designed to sanctify only certain types of human relationships with resources. Property is seen as an inert, separate thing with which we can do whatever we wish.

To Relationalize Property is to open up a new conception of property that recognizes the social relationships that are inextricably blended into any landscape, creative work, building, or sacred space. As French anthropologist of law Étienne Le Roy has rightly pointed out, what truly matters in a legal and political sense is the interpretation of the term “belong.” To whom does a piece of land or knowledge or earthly life belong, and why? And how should the law recognize and operationalize such relationships? These are questions that property law as it now stands mostly avoids, or, at least, regards as choices that individuals should make unilaterally, usually in selfish ways.43

But people can and do nonetheless Relationalize Property, which is truly what human beings have always done and will always do. They have shared relationships with public parks and monuments, artworks, gravesites, and places of worship. They have shared memories and experiences with certain buildings, bodies of water, mountains, and forests. In a commons, these relations are recognized and respected — a challenge that is often mischaracterized as a choice between individual rights and collective interests. But as our earlier discussion about the Nested-I suggests, it is entirely possible for the two to be blended into a new paradigm entirely, a kind of “Ubuntu property.”

Monasteries have done this for centuries. Monasteries are meant to be supportive environments for collective practices, and yet even here, care is taken in most religious orders to ensure that individuals have sufficient private space. Monks may live in simple personal cells or dwellings, but they are built around a cloister open to all. In the famous Florence Charterhouse, in Galluzzo, Italy, monks’ dwellings even include a courtyard for individuals and a small corridor that lets them be alone outside when rain falls. This Carthusian cloister is designed in such a way that individual spaces are generously protected and no one except the monk living there has access to it. The dwellings are organized so that the door of each cell comes off a large corridor used by all. It is no coincidence that medieval commons, too, assured individuals their private space, called curtilage, while managing shared fields as collective enterprises.44 Curtilage has survived into modern jurisprudence as the area around a person’s house that, in the words of the US Supreme Court, harbors the “intimate activity associated with the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of life.’”45

The land use practices of the Brazilian Landless Rural Worker Movement (Movimento Sem Terra, MST) revolve around this blending of individual and collective interests. Everyone together acts as stewards of occupied lands that no individual or collective can own absolutely. On MST lands, farmers can work on their own individual plots of land and use them for whatever purposes they want, but no one can excise their discrete piece of land from the land collectively occupied by the movement and sell it individually. Their use of the land is wrapped up with their belonging to the movement. In other words, the destiny of both individuals and the collective are deeply conjoined. Hundreds of thousands of Brazilian families46 live or have lived in MST’s land-occupation settlements in an effort to redistribute land to rural workers for small-scale farming. Much of MST’s approach and practice are inspired by Catholic social doctrine, which regards the dignity of the human being, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity as fundamental principles. Interestingly, similar philosophical strains can be seen in the Grundgesetz — the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany — which states that private property is not just for individual purposes, but must also serve a social function.47 This is why so many communities authorize people to use land so long as they cultivate it — a “use it or lose it” rule that honors need over absolute ownership.

The essence of relationalized property is the blending of individual and collective interests into a new paradigm. In Chapter Eight, we elaborate on this theme and explore it through five specific examples of “other ways of having.” In each case, the relationalized property helps commoners avoid the domineering or dependent social roles that conventional property rights generally entail. As explained in Chapter Eight, the Park Slope Food Coop uses unpaid, decommodified labor as a way to Pool & Share the benefits of a supermarket among its members. The Open Source Seed Initiative has pioneered ways to let farmers legally save, replant, and share seed, and breed new varieties. A large federation of German co-housing projects, Mietshäuser Syndikat, has taken a vast amount of housing off the market, enabled residents’ stewardship of the buildings, and prevented the sale or liquidation of the housing.
All of these vanguard projects embody the idea of existential co-possession and use over the idea of absolute dominion that property generally fosters. The purpose of Relationalized Property is to enable us to nourish relationships with each other, the nonhuman world, and past and future generations by design.

Keep Commons & Commerce Distinct

You might wonder why cooperatives are often cited as examples of the commons when in fact many of them seem to produce for and sustain themselves entirely from the market. Why do we have tens of thousands of cooperatives bringing together “over one billion people around the world” according to the International Co-operative Alliance, with sales of $2.2 trillion among the largest three hundred cooperatives worldwide48 — and yet the dominant economic model remains firmly in the saddle? The reason is that many cooperatives have not found cultural means to Keep Commons & Commerce Distinct. And the law doesn’t help. It almost always encourages, if not privileges, market-based activity over nonmarket, and commons-based options.

Keep Commons & Commerce Distinct

One of the top priorities of any commons, therefore, is to preserve its integrity in the face of an often-predatory market order. A commons must take special pains to protect itself from enclosure.

In a society where so much importance is placed on money, it is impossible to avoid the collision between commons and commerce. To protect commoning, affirmative steps to keep commerce at arm’s length are essential. This is a lesson illustrated by free software. Many programmers find “their development environment radically changed, sometimes for the worse, by the entrance of paid labor into their communities,” according to the free software programmer and academic Benjamin Mako Hill.49 Once money is introduced into a commons for free software development, he notes, “it brings with it a new style of working and a new type of inter-developer relationships.” Commoners lose their motivation to Contribute Freely (see p. 106–107), not because they can’t necessarily afford to, but because they feel unjustly treated if others are getting paid. When money is part of the picture, people often begin to reorient their aspirations and focus on the norms that markets regard as important. Slowly and subtly, the gravitational pull of money tends to undermine the integrity of commoning — its social relations, independent values, and long-term goals.

Hill cites empirical evidence that paid labor in socially driven endeavors tends to crowd out volunteers, who see their work as less indispensable and meaningful, inducing them to contribute less or even quit.50 Once money is introduced, it also creates a problem of how to spend it, and who makes those decisions. “It’s easier for a successful volunteer free software project to get money than it is to decide how to spend it,” Hill once pointed out. This is not an insuperable problem, of course, and many needs can only be fulfilled through markets. Yet if purchases of goods and services, or paid labor, substitute for what can be performed through commoning, it will begin to erode intrinsic motivations.

To be sure, commoners generally need money too, at least in some modest ways. In medieval times, commons were a way to meet everyday needs with only a minimal need for cash for occasional purchases. Commoning provided what we would now call a basic income — access to resources that ensure one’s basic survival. While contemporary commons can hardly avoid the use of money, they can (and must) strive for as much structural independence as possible. This is a gradual process that requires the ability to flip the script and ask the right questions. Instead of asking how I can earn more money, it is more appropriate to ask, how can I organize my life in such a way that I become less dependent on money? How do I decommodify daily life? Similar questions should be asked at the level of a project, initiative, infrastructure, or platform.

Those accustomed to buying services generally act as consumers, an ethic that tends to work at cross-purposes to commoning. In a way, whenever something is designed as a bidding process or requires a set of deliverables or presents itself as a buy and sell transaction, or warns that if you don’t participate, others will, a calculative rationality and money are being used to supersede Peer Governance. It is not just the promise or exchange of money that can override commoning, however. This can result from the presumption that “this is the only way to get things done.”

And yet, there are ways for a commons to interact with the market economy while preventing the logic of strict reciprocity (equivalent exchange) and highest bidders and cheapest rates to prevail. When a French city council offered to pay EnCommuns, a commons-based network of database programmers, to do some work, it suddenly introduced external performance pressures, trumping the project’s original goals and its self-determined work rhythms. As one participant reported, “A gap opened up between those who deliver a lot and get the money and those who [can only] deliver from time to time and do so without payment.” A subtle, almost imperceptible shift in the inner dynamics of the commoning resulted. Instead of contributing to the project for intrinsic reasons (fun, networking, learning from others, social impact), people became focused on “meeting the contract.” Soon the priorities of an outside contractor were seen as more important than the desires of other commoners. The logic of competition and efficiency surged to the fore, eclipsing the goal of voluntary cooperation. “Instead of helping people to change the behavioral patterns triggered by a flawed economic system,” the participant noted, “it reinforced these patterns.”

In response, EnCommuns created a semi-permeable membrane, an ingenious way to preserve the spirit of its commoning while engaging with commercial actors. First of all, EnCommuns demanded that any commercial enterprise pay for work produced by the commons.The point was to generate money to support the (nonmarket) activities of the commons. But rather than treating it as a conventional market transaction — payment for specific services — it required that any contracting company make a financial contribution to the commons for work that commoners would perform in any case. In other words, the business would not be “paying for a special service or product,” it would be making a donation. In addition, all contributions are publicly disclosed. EnCommuns’s goal is to make sure that it doesn’t come to depend mainly on revenue from selling something, whether its people’s labor or products. Why? Because a commons based on such a design will quickly prioritize market success over commoners’ needs, which is likely to begin to unravel its social fabric. By treating payments as donations, EnCommuns decouples acts of giving to and taking from the commons, remaining sovereign in how it makes use of money within its commons. EnCommuns explains, “Our idea is to help commercial organizations gain confidence in the commons approach while helping the commons to be funded when they are used for business purposes.”51 This same approach has been used by the P2P Foundation in its Peer Production License (p. 402 #16), which grants free use to anyone to use work from the commons except for commercial users, who must pay.

The transnational Guerrilla Media Collective — a socially minded group of translators, designers, and media workers — has developed a governance system that integrates commoning and paid work. Their Commons-Oriented Open Cooperative Governance and Economic Model, version 2.0, lets people pursue mission-oriented work and paid work while explicitly requiring people to care for the health of the collective and individual members.52 Group decision making and responsibilities are based on different levels of engagement — casual, unpaid involvement; a formal process of “dating” that is partly paid; and committed, paid membership with specified responsibilities. A credit system tracks people’s pro bono projects and paid work, while care work is explicitly visualized and weighed against productive work. The purpose is to keep commoning as the core priority.

To Keep Commons and Commerce Distinct, the stewards of many community forests allow the cutting of trees for personal use only, not for market sale. Fisheries commons often stipulate the amount of fish that any individual fisher may sell on the open market. University administrations tend to serve as intermediaries between funding sources and scientists so that researchers can have open, honest debates and share their findings without the taint of corporate influence.

Finance Commons Provisioning

In a world in which capitalist finance and money are ubiquitous and the default tools for getting things done, a question arises: how can provisioning in commons be financed without the harmful influences of money and debt? We have found that three general approaches can be effective in helping people escape dependency on capitalist finance while enhancing their security and freedom. These are money-lite commoning to reduce the need for money and markets; collaborative financing that lets commoners create and circulate money or credit for themselves, wholly from within their commons; and new public-commons circuits of finance, which allow taxpayer funds administered by government to be used to support commons.

Finance Commons Provisioning

Before exploring these three approaches, some general observations must be made. As we have seen, the health of any commons depends upon preventing money from dominating its social dynamics. If debt or capital compromise people’s independence or sow social divisions, a commons will likely fall apart. It is therefore helpful for commoners (or anybody) to become less dependent on money and markets. Peer-driven approaches enable commoners to recirculate the value that they create for mutual benefit, rather than letting creditors or outside equity holders siphon value away in the form of interest or dividend payments.

A basic question that must be addressed in a commons, French commons thinker Philippe Aigrain once said, is, “What type of relations do we want to exist between the monetary economy and the commons?” We must also ask, What type of money culture do commoners want to develop for themselves? These questions should be answered in such a way that, at a minimum, capital or money does not metastasize and convert cooperative activities into capitalism. The pursuit of money and market success, usually seen as a necessary path to community well-being, too often ends up subordinating it to outside markets and capital. Therefore, it is imperative to Keep Commons & Commerce Distinct (p. 151). Another way to minimize the harmful influence of money is to Practice Gentle Reciprocity (p. 108) so that the calculative rationality of market relationships does not become the cultural norm, crowding out solidarity and the generative creativity of commoning.

Tech entrepreneur Frank Karlitschek discovered this lesson the hard way. In 2010, he started an open source file hosting community, ownCloud, to compete with the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. These platforms allow web users to synchronize the use of data and documents among diverse digital devices and to store that information in the cloud on someone else’s servers. This software architecture enables multiple parties to reliably access and use large collections of files in authorized, secure ways.

To expand development of the ownCloud platform, Karlitschek in 2011 secured millions of dollars in venture capital financing to start a company, ownCloud, Inc., at which he became chief technology officer. But by 2016 he learned how profoundly outside money influences an organization’s strategies and practices. Even though hundreds of programmers were contributing to ownCloud as an open source project, company executives did not properly acknowledge the contributions of the community or share internal corporate deliberations with it, according to Karlitschek. Quite abruptly, he decided to resign, concerned that investors had “thrown the project under the bus.” In his resignation letter, Karlitschek wrote: “Without sharing too much, there are some moral questions popping up for me. Who owns the community? Who owns ownCloud itself? And what matters more, short-term money or long-term responsibility and growth? Is ownCloud just another company or do we also have to answer to the hundreds of volunteers who contribute and make it what it is today? These questions brought me to the very tough decisions: I have decided to leave my own company today.”53

Weeks later, Karlitschek announced that he would fork the code and reconstitute the community of contributors under a new project called NextCloud. It would not have external investors, but be driven by the talents and commitment of a large community of volunteer programmers, in a more authentic open source manner. In addition, NextCloud, with its modular structure, would offer a variety of new functionalities, such as an address book, photo galleries, music and video playback, task manager, feed reader, email program, word processing, mindmaps, administrative tools, and more. Within two years, the Nextcloud project had 1,800 unpaid programmers and millions of users around the globe, including many large corporations such as Siemens and ARD. It continues to build out its shared vision — without the artificial limitations imposed by investors. At the Bits & Bäume (Bits & Trees) conference in Berlin in 2018 — a first-ever gathering of environmentalists and free software hackers (the “critical technology movement”) — Karlitschek reflected that his ownCloud experience taught him to focus on ensuring independence when financing an endeavor. A critical lesson for commoners as well.

Commoners have a variety of strategies for minimizing the pernicious influences of money, which we will now explore, but whichever one is chosen, the tail must not wag the dog by allowing money to drive our aspirations and practices.

Money-lite commoning. Commoning means relying on sharing, divid­ing up, and mutualization to meet needs as much as possible, and on collaborative financing. This lets people minimize their reliance on money and markets. We call this “money-lite” — the ethic and social practice of reducing one’s need for money as much as possible through sharing, co-using, DIT (do-it-together), and other practices that minimize reliance on market exchange. This is fundamental to all commons. Commoners can improve their long-term independence by withdrawing as much as possible from dealings with the market/state system.

Money-lite commoning is how hackers helped neutralize Microsoft’s proprietary abuses of its monopolies over Windows and Office in the early 2000s (see pp. 128 and 167–168). They developed GNU/Linux, Open Office, and scores of other high-quality open source programs as practical, low-cost or no-cost alternatives to the standard programs offered by the market giants. Through shareable, peer-produced programs, people can create digital commons of their own and escape draconian licensing agreements and abusive technical designs. Users can rest easy that their code is compatible with other systems and legally modifiable. They can’t be extorted into paying for expensive, unnecessary upgrades.

In nondigital spaces, there are many proven systems for reducing one’s individual costs or eliminating the need for market activity. Community land trusts, by decommodifying the land under buildings, can reduce the cost of housing and small enterprises. Co-housing and peer-to-peer car-sharing and tool-sharing projects are forms of money-lite commoning. Cosmo-local production (see pp. 195–197) sheds the costs of proprietary design (based on patents, trademarks, etc.) and enables less expensive modular, local production.

The point of money-lite commoning is to help people focus on their real needs and escape the endless cycle of disempowerment that a consumerist culture generally promotes. The capitalist economy spends extraordinary energy and money trying to get people to individually consume even though much of this is wholly unnecessary. David Fleming calls the resulting infrastructures of dependency “regrettable necessities” — which then spawn a whole layer of products like cars and smart phones that are soon considered essential. Commoners can escape many of these “necessities” by developing their own systems, infrastructure, spaces, and resource-pools for sharing.

Collaborative financing consists of pooling money from individuals, the community, and the wider public to finance common wealth. This strategy not only strengthens a commons here and now, it gives structural support for commoning in the future. Historically, collaborative financing has included such models as mutual credit societies and insurance pools, cooperative finance, community-controlled microfinance, and local currencies. In recent times, crowdfunding has been taken these capacities to new levels in both small and very big projects. Goteo, a crowdfunding platform for the commons that started in Spain, is a preeminent force of collaborative finance. From its founding in 2012 through 2017, it has raised more than 7.3 million euros, funded more than 900 commons projects throughout Europe and Latin America, and provided online assistance to 2,500 additional projects.54 Goteo differs from conventional crowdfunding websites by requiring that projects actually advance the principles of commons.

At a larger scale, the Wikimedia movement in 2016-17 received 6.1 million donations totaling US$91 million, with an average gift of $14.79. This pooling of money, distributed among sixteen wiki projects, means that anyone can have noncommercial access to an online dictionary, quotation database, collections of digital books and learning materials, databases of plant and animal species, repositories of photographs and images, and travel guides. By shifting these materials out of the commercial market, where sellers are constantly trying to capture people’s personal data and advertise to them, the many wiki projects let people escape all that.

Terre de Liens, a French organization, pools money to buy land for aspiring contemporary “peasant-farmers.” The goal is to decommodify land in perpetuity — i.e., remove land from the market and hold it in trust forever, in the manner of a community land trust. One portion of funding is dedicated to “solidarity savings,” which is used exclusively to help acquire new farmland. In Germany, a federation of housing commons, Mietshäuser Syndikat, does something similar. It offers collaborative financing to help groups of residents buy co-housing projects, in effect decommodifying them. Then, to continue that process of what it calls “solidarity transfers,” it collects one-tenth of a euro per square meter of living space from every resident in its more than 160 co-housing projects. (For more on Mietshäuser Syndikat, see Chapter Eight.)

Artabana, a federation for community-based healthcare funding with thousands of affiliates in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, uses a similar strategy. Artabana is organized in small groups whose members provide social insurance to each other. There are no restrictions regarding people’s choices of physician, treatment option, drug, or remedy. The groups jointly determine, in a sphere of trust, the mutual assistance and the appropriation of solidarity fund resources each group contributes to at a group level. Additionally, a portion of the local pools of money goes into a so-called emergency fund run by Artabana International. Usually, a group can cover the healthcare expenses for its members simply through pooling and dividing up money. However, if someone in a local group faces unexpectedly high medical expenses — for instance, in case of chronic diseases or complicated operations — the federation’s emergency fund can provide additional support. It functions as a kind of reinsurance within the community-based insurance system.

When “Jane” in Australia found that she needed surgery for a severe heart condition, she and her husband planned to use their home mortgage to finance the anticipated cost of AUS $35,000. But it turned out that her local Artabana group had contacted Artabana Germany, and their emergency fund was able to pay for her surgery. “We were humbled and surprised that Artabana Germany’s emergency fund would support me without knowing me … Within a week the money was in our account at Artabana Hobart. It was initially hard to accept the gesture from strangers. We felt self-conscious about the generosity.” All of the Artabana projects function as federated pools of funding to cover larger magnitudes of risk and future needs.

A dynamic worldwide movement is attempting to minimize the pernicious influences of money by inventing their own community-
created and -controlled currencies. This often takes the form of a local currency to serve specific needs within a limited geographic area or among registered users. For example, in extremely poor neighborhoods in Kenya, the Bangla Pesa and Lida Pesa are neighborhood-owned and -controlled currencies, part of the larger Sarafu Credit system. The currencies enable members to capture and recirculate value created within the community while preventing the outside economy from siphoning it away. Such systems are complementary to conventional (fiat) money and serve as building blocks for a commons-based economy. Researcher Grzegorz Sobiecki estimates there are more than 6,000 alternative currencies worldwide.55

Each of these platforms and federations — Goteo, Terre de Liens, Mietshäuser Syndikat, Artabana, local currencies — requires some sort of collective return. Goteo, for example, requires that works are released under Creative Commons or other free licenses. This ensures that future creators will be able to copy, share, and/or modify those works. The basic principle is that anyone who takes from the commons must give something back to it. Also, they do not just seek to amass financial contributions, but to pay forward specific benefits so that others may enjoy them or so future commons can be created.

Creating new public-commons circuits of finance. The state provides plenty of support to market capitalism such as subsidies, legal privileges, and state-approved monopolies. There is no reason why it should not recognize and support the value of commoning as well, through state investment, cofunding of commons, and creative financial tools and systems. This could take many forms.

The most obvious approach would be for the state to provide generous direct financial support to commons-based projects. The state already uses taxpayer money for all sorts of important national purposes; certainly commoning creates immense value of its own that should be similarly supported. However, state funding tends to rely on restrictive bureaucratic procedures and strict sets of deliverables, while any commons requires the space and time for experimentation and creative evolution. In engaging with any state program that purports to support commoning, commoners must be wary of the procedural burdens of state funding and the risks of depending on such support. State funding can easily distort the integrity of a project, open the door to outside political influence, and risk the abrupt termination of support when the political winds shift.

Some of the problems of direct state funding might be avoided by instituting regimes for statutory resource-pooling, for example, similar to a government-mandated flat fee on recorded music, performances, and other types of creative content. The mandatory fee would recognize the actual role that nonmarket creative communities play in helping commercial entertainment: they help companies identify and recruit promising new commercial talent, and keep various musical traditions alive. Why shouldn’t commercial players indirectly repay the debt they have to collaborative creative communities? The finance mechanism of mandatory flat fees would be predictable and easily scalable, and could help large groups of creative people.56

Just as government agencies often assist businesses by providing loan guarantees or actual loan funds, the state could create state funding programs to finance commons-managed housing, Fab Labs, cosmo-local production, telecommunications, and other activities. The state could require that a percentage of tax revenues from fisheries or timber harvesting be put into a pool of funds managed by multi­stakeholder organizations acting as community-based trusts to manage coastal lands, forests, or natural reserves. Perhaps the most ambitious state–commons financing scheme would be an unconditional basic income. At present, this idea takes many forms, but the one that would most empower commoners would be to authorize communities to decide how to use and share their time and talents.

6. Provisioning Through Commons

There is a saying in Silicon Valley: eat your own dog food — meaning people at the company must actually use the software they make, in real-world circumstances.1 “Dogfooding” is considered the best way to ensure that something truly works well. It is revealing that the software industry has such a term to describe the internal testing of its products. It points to a hidden weakness of the conventional economy — the treatment of production and consumption as separate activities, and the ultra-specialization of production in ways that segregate design, documentation, and manufacturing as separate professional silos. This bureaucratization means that each employee depends on the work product of others without really understanding the complexities involved. It also makes it easier for any department to cut corners on quality and safety, knowing that unwitting consumers may or may not be able to do anything about it.

Some companies realize that integrating the lessons of real-world consumption into the design and production process is indispensable. As the primary creator of TeX Typesetting software, Donald E. Knuth, once confessed: “I came to the conclusion that the designer of a new system must not only be the implementer and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual. The separation of any of these four components would have hurt TeX significantly. If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important.”2 Users have firsthand knowledge that is invaluable in design and production, even if economists regard the separation of production and consumption as an inexorable fact of modern life.

Trained to see the dismemberment of complex production processes as efficient and natural, and its segregation from consumption as a core premise of “the economy,” economists tend to overlook a more elegant, practical approach to provisioning — commoning. Commoning is at heart an act of social self-organization and constant learning whose central purpose is to help people meet needs by producing things or services together. (We prefer to use the word “provisioning” as a nonmarket version of “production.”) Meeting needs has long been a standard definition of what an economy is all about, so commoning should properly be seen as part of “the economy,” too, even though economics textbooks generally ignore this fact. Commons let people produce food and clothing, shelter and means of transportation, machinery and microscopes, software and hardware, drugs, healthcare, and even prosthetics.3 It is breathtaking how much people can provide for themselves by aligning interests, motivations, and agency toward a common goal. Commoning provides a way to leverage social trust within new organizational forms to coordinate people’s actions.

Through commons, people can blend their social and economic needs, providing the basis for re-integrating production and consumption. This practice is especially prevalent in the digital realm, where users and producers tend to be the same people (“prosumers”). In conventional economic terms, a commons helps reduce the need for administration, lawyering, “human resource” management, and marketing by instead relying on a community of trust and individual commitment. Who needs advertising when the goal is to meet needs, not promote consumption?

So why put the interests and needs of producers in one box and those of consumers in another box, and blindly assume that the marketplace will somehow reconcile them? Why not re-imagine the whole process as an enterprise where production and consumption are integrated as one organic process of planning, design, documentation, and provisioning along with use, reuse, and waste management? Production need not consist of a series of complex, interlocking markets for labor, commodity sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, retail, advertising, etc. It can occur through commons that let people decide to co-make and co-use what they need, often with a division of labor but without that strict provision of roles, organized through hierarchies. The most significant difference with corporate bureaucracy is that the output is made available to others and the benefits are retained and shared. Different skills, talents, and knowledge can all be orchestrated to contribute to production. Knowledge can be readily shared, designs can focus on quality, and provisioning methods can be adjusted to improve results — all without catering to the harsh quarterly profit demands of investors. Tasks can be rotated so that people do not need to organize their work according to narrow roles defined by objectified, artificial value (price, wages) and fixed job categories. Freed of market imperatives, greater flexibility and adaptability are possible.

Besides reintegrating production and consumption, as well as fragmented steps of production, commons can re-incorporate care into our conceptualization of the economy (see pp. 169–173). With the rise of capitalism, caring, childrearing, and education have been seen as activities external to the working of the economy. Except for public education, they are something for individuals to take care of on their own time, and at their own expense. A commons does not externalize care, and so is more able to take account of a person’s fuller life, not just their need to earn money.

* * *

In this chapter, we describe the character of “production in common,” or, more precisely, “provisioning through commoning,” by examining ten key patterns. These are the structured regularities that tend to be needed for commons provisioning. These patterns manifest each time in distinctive ways, much as a flower will grow differently in forest shade, direct sun, or moist riverbanks. Whatever the circumstances, provisioning remains a practical enterprise that aims to get things done.

The critical difference between commoning and the capital-centric economy is that the latter regards its work results almost exclusively as marketable products. They are fungible artifacts whose value is mostly defined by their price. Since commons blur (or even eliminate!) the roles of “producers” and “consumers,” so too the very character of the “products” changes. The things produced are not designed to be sold, or sold in high volumes at the highest prices, or to pander to our consumer fantasies and then fall apart through planned obsolescence so that the cycle can be repeated. Provisioning through Commons means producing useful, durable things that will have ongoing social importance to their makers and users, and so the end results are not “goods” or “commodities,” as the classical economist would call them. Commoners instead cultivate affective ties to their care-wealth — forests, farmland, water, urban spaces — which often become part of their culture, social lives, and identities. The goal of Provisioning through Commons is not maximum efficiency, profit, or higher Gross Domestic Product. It aims simply to meet needs and provide a stable, fair, satisfying, and ecologically minded way of life. There is no economic growth imperative built into provisioning except its motive to increasingly displace, and substitute for, exploitative or expensive market practices.

Most of the concerns that the dominant economy obsesses about —
growth, market share, competition, copyright, patents, advertising, branding, opening new markets — play hardly any role in the commons. This is because the commons economy invites people to reorient their perspectives and aspire to a different set of outcomes than those of market capitalism — the satisfaction of real, not contrived, needs. Security. A sense of belonging and connection. A meaningful life. Implicit in many commons, too, is a vision of advancing greater freedom, fairness, and sustainability for all.

The biggest shift that the commons economy brings is a move from the economy as an autonomous, globalized supermachine to an economy that nurtures life on its own terms, at appropriate scales. In the course of Provisioning through Commons a tapestry of relationships is woven, which confirms the wisdom of ecophilosopher Thomas Berry: “The universe is primarily a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”4 The basic difference between the commons and capital-driven markets could not be stated more succinctly.

The difficult challenge, however, is how to devise structures and encourage social dynamics for commons provisioning. We have identified ten recurrent, hardy patterns that can build out a more robust commons economy:

• Provisioning Through Commons
• Make & Use Together
• Support Care & Decommodified Work
• Share the Risks of Provisioning
• – Four Modes of Contribution and Allocation:
• Contribute & Share
• Pool, Cap & Divide Up
• Pool, Cap & Mutualize
• Trade with Price Sovereignty
• 
  Use Convivial Tools
• Rely on Distributed Structures
• Creatively Adapt & Renew

Make & Use Together

Make & Use Together is a time-honored way for people to meet shared needs. To reduce costs and affirm commonality, people often decide to co-create and share access to pools of information, knowledge, money, working spaces, tools, and infrastructures. To make and use something together is as old as the human species and as new as the internet.

Make & Use Together

As in other patterns we introduce in these chapters, the “&” matters. The pattern is Make and Use Together, not simply “Use Together.” If you think like a commoner, you think about the thing produced and the entire generative process as something to be used by yourself, shared, and potentially used by others. The process is not primarily about making and producing for your own or other people’s consumption. It’s about meeting shared needs. When making new creative works, a person forfeits his or her proprietary control under copyright (using Creative Commons licenses) to ensure that certain use rights such as copying and sharing are available. Commoners don’t want to restrict others from co-producing the same thing; they want as many people as possible to join in the enterprise. Encouraging more commoning in online contexts is highly attractive, because, as Linus Torvalds discovered in those early days of the World Wide Web, the more the merrier. On open digital platforms, where it is virtually costless to reproduce things (but for the energy-intensive infrastructure), more value can be generated as more people have the capacity to participate.

The making that goes on in a commons should not really be regarded as DIY (do it yourself) but as DIT — “do it together,” to meet one’s own needs and potentially the needs of others. This explains why CSA farms, for example, have no interest in preventing other CSAs from forming and flourishing in their region. You hardly ever read or hear about a CSA competing with another CSA. It is pretty much the opposite. As a member, you want to encourage other CSAs to form, at least until everyone has easy access to a nearby CSA farm.

This pattern has endless variations. It is the standard process in the makerspaces, open workshops and Fab Labs around the world that bring together hackers, professional technologists, digital artists, and amateurs to tinker, experiment, and fabricate things together. According to a Study by Cedifa (Center for Digital Fabrication), a Fab Lab (fabrication laboratory) can be opened within seven days and a basic investment of only US$5,000 if it relies on commons-oriented approaches, including the use of open source software.5 Open design and manufacturing communities build furniture, electronics, farm equipment, and open source motor vehicles in this manner.

In some commons, the focus is on shared use, in others it is on shared making. The popularity of both approaches can be seen in the 260 open workshops in German-speaking countries where hobbyists, master craftspeople, and others work with wood, 3D printers, metal, and electronics. Most anything that normally comes from a factory can be DIT-produced — bokashi buckets for urban composting, cargo bikes and solar-powered cars, lamps, microscopes, and motherboards, cloth, toilets and replacement parts, wooden furniture, and visors. Worldwide, volunteers in more than 1,300 repair cafes are fixing broken appliances and household items, bringing to life an idea introduced in 2009 in the Netherlands by journalist and blogger Martine Postma.6 The open workshops and repair cafes are places for community building, collective thinking, and learning. They Creatively Adapt & Renew (see below) countless objects that are considered waste, giving them a second life cycle.

Support Care and Decommodified Work

Work in a commons is not a purchased unit of commodified work, aka “labor.” It is an activity that draws upon people’s deep passions and values — their whole selves. Geographer Neera Singh calls this sort of commitment “affective labor”7 because people show love, devotion, and care — or simply awareness for what needs to be done —
when stewarding a forest, caring for elderly parents, designing and curating a web archive, teaching a craft or tending a community garden. Care and commitment in a shared endeavor is central for commoning. It is the elemental glue that holds people together. It occurs, for example, when parents cook, clean, and provide personal support to their children, relatives, and parents — the household as the core focus of the economy, as in the original Greek sense of the term oikos. In a commons this household is bigger than in a Greek polis; it comprises the space and all the people and elements involved in meeting needs.8

Support Care and Decommodified Work

Care occurs when people bring their full humanity to a task instead of having impersonal, money-mediated relationships with market resources. Affective labor in effect converts a mere commodity into something that is cared for. One might more accurately call it care-wealth. Unlike a market resource whose value is defined by its price, care-wealth has value because there is a nimbus of memories, meanings, and special feelings associated with it, the result of people dedicating their time and care. The social energy that hovers around care-wealth resembles the halo of electrical energy that pulsates around a magnet. It is no surprise that many communities have special feelings for sacred places or the focal points of people’s care — a public square, a riverfront, an ancient tree. Certain theaters of commoning — a food cooperative, a local forest, a land trust, a collaborative website — acquire special meaning and emotional resonance as people commit their heart and soul to them (and, indeed, only if they do so).

The personal and social energies of care accomplish a lot of meaningful work without which a society could not hold together. As we describe in this chapter, countless commons rely on care that is contributed freely, shared, divided up, or developed through gentle reciprocity. Caring is not the result of commoning, but clearly a core force of commoning that also takes place everywhere, even in markets. The difference is that the market economy — while welcoming what care and intrinsic motivation can accomplish — is incapable of summoning and supporting care. Cash inducements (wages, fees, bribes, subsidies) may or may not elicit genuine care because market incentives are mostly concerned with “productive labor” — outcomes that have measurable, tangible economic benefits. Caring and commoning, by contrast, attempt to speak directly to our inner selves, as Nested-I’s, with integrity and sensitivity. This helps explain why commons are better hosting spaces for enabling care and decommodified work to flourish.

To be sure, the conventional economy has commodified all sorts of care into “care work,” including childcare and healthcare. Care is often structured into units of labor organized by the logics of productivity and measurability. But it is impossible to squeeze human relationships and care into a regime of schedules, forms, and productivity metrics. When subjected to a calculative rationality, care is no longer care. It is a form of robotics performed by human automatons.

However, as we saw with Buurtzorg Nederland, the neighborhood home care described in Chapter One, genuine care can be provided to large numbers of people without market incentives degrading its essential human quality. What’s key is retaining the appropriate scale. “People are not bicycles who can be organized according to an organizational chart,” as the Buurtzorg founder put it. Providing care through commons, in defiance of market principles, does not mean that quality of care suffers. It improves care because people have the freedom and time to provide personalized, situationally appropriate attention to people.

While some care activities have been commodified, most care still takes place outside of the formal economy. Economists have externalized it, which is their way of simply ignoring this area of life. This indifference towards care and meeting basic human needs means that caring for countless societal problems — family life, intergenerational support in extended families, local culture, informal social pursuits — is made invisible. The care jobs created by markets are not only badly paid, but usually relegated primarily to women, immigrants, and nonwhite minorities.

The irony is that care and decommodified work are utterly indispensable to the functioning of the economy, including “productive labor.” No civilization could function without care activities. Where would the next generation of employees come from if families did not raise, educate, and socialize them? How could a community exist without people helping each other as neighbors and socializing young people to be good citizens? Once you enumerate all of the uncommodified work that is needed to keep a society functioning — subsistence provisioning, householding, civic life, voluntarism, etc. — it becomes obvious that money and markets are only the tip of the iceberg of the economy. “Unpaid work is worth billions,” as a German journalist has put it, using the only language many seem to understand.9

To Support Care & Decommodified Work is to rescue this neglected care sector from oblivion and put it at the center of economic thinking. It is to validate a different logic for organizing the economy. Commoning invites us to forgo self-advantage rather than maximize personal gain. By providing care, we make ourselves vulnerable and dependent on others. We sacrifice our time, energy, and awareness in order to develop healthy relationships — toward ourselves and our bodies, toward others, and toward nature. Instead of striving to be super-efficient with our time and money, we prioritize human presence and connection. In this respect, the commons challenges the very heart of market economics by asserting different standards of valuation. When economic traditionalists carp that care models cannot scale, they miss the point: real care is supposed to occur in small, intimate contexts where authentic relationships can develop. There is obviously a role for larger systems, but care is not just about units of service delivery. It is about another way of understanding the economy as an “oikonomy” or “ecommony” where “economy is care,” as Ina Prätorius of Care Revolution, an advocacy network in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, puts it.

Iceberg with market economy

Two generations of feminist economists,10 many of them associated with the International Association for Feminist Economics, and researchers like Diane Elson, Julie Nelson, Alicia Girón González, Brigitte Young, Adelheid Biesecker, and Friederike Haberman, have pioneered incisive critiques about the deficiencies of mainstream economics when it comes to care. This literature shares a great deal of ground with commoning because both are generally ignored or dismissed as externalities. Both discourses attempt to leapfrog over the flawed premises of standard economics (e.g., homo economicus; value as equivalent to price) by asserting a different epistemological framework.

Studies show that people who can escape market regimes of valuation (i.e., money, prices) often show greater care, motivation, and concern for quality.11 This occurs because the use of wages, bonuses, bribes, and other cash incentives often sends a signal that induces people to behave as competitive and even cynical market players. By contrast, commoning tends to encourage people to give the best of themselves and nourish deeper relationships and social trust. By providing care and decommodified work, they become a Nested-I. The classic example of this (not necessarily conscious) dynamic is the gift economy of blood donation. British researcher Richard Titmuss in the 1960s found that volunteers who give blood are more likely to have safer, healthier blood than the people who are paid money for their blood — because the latter often have substance abuse problems or illnesses.12

Share the Risks of Provisioning

In the capitalist economy, companies are said to shoulder the risks of creating and marketing a product, even though their research and development budget is often subsidized by taxpayers and even though they often displace risks and expenses on to consumers, the environment, and future generations. This is their rationale for reaping the profits after production. In a planned economy, some risks are assumed by the state or simply ignored. In a commons, however, where the distinction between consumer and producer gets blurred, everybody who is actively involved accepts co-responsibility for the sharing of risks before and during production. These risks may include the uncertainty of the crop yields from a CSA farm, the complications of maintaining a community-based Wi-Fi infrastructure such as Guifi.net, or the uncertainties associated with the open source process needed to design an affordable, nonproprietary tractor such as the Life-Trac of Open Source Ecology.13

Share the Risks of Provisioning

The ways of sharing risks take many different forms. In crowdfunding campaigns, donors essentially give a gift to project leaders to develop a new software app, invention, or social service. When contributions are pooled for a collective investment, the risks are fairly small for any individual while the potential benefits for everyone are large. In many German CSAs, there is a process known as a “bidding round” (Bieterrunde) in which the CSA farm informs members at the beginning of the planting season how much money will be needed to grow the year’s crops. Members then gather in a circle, reflect together on the group’s overall need, and decide individually what each person can afford to give. Then members submit anonymous pledges of money into the common pot. If not enough funds are raised in the first bidding round, the size of the shortfall is announced and a second round of contributions starts. Usually the needed sum is raised in only two rounds. This is the way that risks for growing the season’s crops are shared without requiring people of unequal capacities to contribute equal shares toward dividing up the harvest equally.

When risks are shared, everything changes: the power relationships, the decision-making processes about what to produce and how, the cash flow, and obviously, the sharing of the wealth. For these reasons, sharing the risks of provisioning provides an important step in transcending a market-driven economy. This brings us to the next four patterns of Provisioning through Commons, each of which addresses how to allocate wealth that is generated. Before looking at each pattern, it helps to make some conceptual clarifications and to review the basic choices that commoners face.

Contribute & Share

Pooling means contributing to a stock of resources to reach a common goal or solve a specific problem, spontaneously or by voluntary agreement. Then the pool is shared. You can pool virtually everything –
knowledge, physical resources, one’s time, energy, food, tools, ideas, or money. Pooling is not just about putting things into a collective pot, it’s also about contributing one’s talents, energy, imagination, and services to create a commons that can benefit everyone. When people Contribute & Share, whatever is needed is freely contributed (sometimes with a gentle nudge) by all participants. And then it is shared without calculating everyone’s individual benefit. Participants reduce their individual costs of provisioning, increase the likelihood of meeting everybody’s needs better, and develop a sense of co-responsibility and solidarity. As in Pool & Divide, everybody can participate regardless of their financial means or social status.

Make & Use Together

Contribute & Share works in all realms of commoning, but it is particularly powerful on open networks, where the usefulness of information, ideas, knowledge, code, and design grows the more that they are shared and adapted. However, what matters most here as well is the “&.” Pooling without sharing in the commons is like shopping without money in capitalism: it won‘t work. You can only share what you pool, contribute, or co-produce in the first place.

Contributing software code has been likened to throwing vegetables into a common cooking pot into which everyone contributes what they have, and everyone can take what they wish.14 Indeed, Pool & Share is a routine practice among programmers and designers who contribute to a shared body of code and designs. It is also a routine practice among global communities of open hardware designers who create shareable blueprints for farm equipment (Open Source Ecology, Atelier Paysan), furniture (Open Desk), houses (WikiHouse), motor vehicles (Wikispeed), and prosthetics (Open Prosthetics Project). Institutions may Contribute & Share, too. A classic instance is the Europeana Initiative of nearly 400 museums, archives, and cultural institutions, which are collaborating on a public process to label and preserve public-domain art works.

Pool, Cap & Divide Up

In cases in which a common resource is finite and can be used up, Pool, Cap & Divide Up is a variant of Pool & Share. A cap on usage, set through a peer governance process, can address a threat of overuse or insufficient supplies that might occur if everyone takes what she wants. To Pool, Cap & Divide Up speaks to timeless experience and necessity. Hunters manage to kill only so much game but there are many people who need to eat … gatherers acquire only a limited store of nuts and fruit … guests at potluck dinners bring only so much food, which somehow must be made to serve everyone.

Pool, Cap & Divide Up

Farmers or pastoralists who use the same land for agriculture or grazing animals often create rules specifying how much and in which months an individual may harvest. It is typical in a commons to limit individual usage so that the land is not overexploited. Dividing Up the available water, fish, fruits, and harvest can be done in any number of imaginative ways.

Pool, Cap & Divide Up is arguably the most prevalent pattern of cooperation in the world today. It always has been. Its prevalence and practicality are often ignored because they don’t conform to the standard economic narrative, which insists upon seeing human beings as selfish, materialistic, rational individuals unable to negotiate a fair division of benefits. “In the conventional economy, they [economists] cannot see any more what really works,” said Rainer Kippe of SSM. “What we are doing seems impossible to a typical economist who has studied mainstream textbooks. According to classical theory, what we do can’t work. But in fact … we do it everyday.”17 They Pool, Cap & Divide Up. Indeed, beyond the ken of standard economics, as many as 2.5 billion people around the world manage about eight billion hectares of land through community-based ownership systems, according to the International Land Coalition.18 For things like land, water, forests, and wild game, Pool, Cap & Divide Up is arguably the fairest, most practical strategy.

Pool, Cap & Mutualize

Pool, Cap & Mutualize is useful for dealing with limited resources that you wish to use and steward in common, but don’t necessarily want to divide up. Everyone does not necessarily get an absolutely equal share. The point is for a distinct group of cooperators to collectively meet their needs in a roughly equivalent way and, in so doing, express a basic social solidarity. Cap & Mutualize is a familiar modern principle used in social security systems and healthcare, for example. It can also be seen in the Artabana community health insurance system, described earlier.

Pool, cap & mutualize

There is a reciprocity at play, in that everyone helps oversee the proper, respectful use of the common grazing lands while enjoying benefits from it. But the reciprocity is not a transactional, market-like trade because the commoning has the character of neighborly support and flexibility in fulfilling a shared agreement. This is far different from a cap-and-trade scheme in that users are deciding what an acceptable cap on usage is, based on their own experiences and careful observations. Another benefit of Cap & Mutualize is that it preserves a shared intentionality among the user group, whereas trading encourages individual exploitation of the resource to maximum legal limits (and beyond), otherwise known as the tragedy of the market.

Trade with Price Sovereignty

One of the great powers of a commons is its ability to emancipate itself from markets — and the prices they dictate. Somebody who participates in a commons to support some facet of her life does not need to submit to the omnipotence of many markets. A commons enables people to go their own path. If they need to engage with the market, they can choose their own terms.

Trade with price sovereignty

In the United States, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer came up with a shrewd strategy in the 1960s for dealing with community disempowerment, which in her case was caused by exploitative white-owned businesses. With support from singer Harry Belafonte and a Wisconsin charity, Measure for Measure, she founded an interracial farming cooperative in 1969 on a few dozen acres of Delta land. The goal was to empower poor blacks to grow their own food. “When you’ve got 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup for the winter, nobody can push you around or tell you what to say or do,” Hamer noted.19 Imagine what might happen if commoners emulated this strategy in dozens of realms. It would begin to put serious pressure on the market! That can already be seen in northwest Venezuela, thanks to the commons-based provisioning of Cecosesola.

By creating a quasi-independent provisioning system that operates independently of conventional markets, commoners acquire some freedom from market demands, including price. They can declare their own terms. The ability to assert price sovereignty is a significant source of power, for example. It includes the option to provide people with goods and services for free, or at lower prices than the conventional market does. This is a much-overlooked strategic power. By decommodifying production and rooting it in social practices and trust, commoners can pursue their own agenda in the face of the formidable powers wielded by capital and corporations.

The price-making exercises conducted by Cecosesola (and other commons) means that they are less vulnerable to the highly irregular forces of supply and demand. They have partially withdrawn from conventional markets and so are less dependent on its expenses and volatility. (Of course, peasants still have to buy seeds and other inputs for production from markets.) But the group’s relative price sovereignty is not anticompetitive in the ways prohibited by antitrust law. Price sovereignty is about counting provisioning costs accurately and transparently in the first place, based on actual need and context. Prices as set by conventional markets, on the other hand, tend to reflect the extra expenses of working within a bloated system: advertising, employee recruitment and retention, complicated value chains of suppliers and middlemen, lawyers, market research, packaging, brand identities, government lobbying, campaign contributions to buy better regulation, etc. All of these expenses are opaque and invisibly folded into prices. By comparison, commoning has a much lower cost structure for which it offers a straight-up reckoning.

One might say that there are two forms of price sovereignty — the ability of a community-governed system to determine prices through its own internal processes, and the ability to assert price sovereignty when trading with the outside market world. The goal in either case is to strive for as much autonomy as possible to insulate the commons from market pressures. By having a commons support a significant part of their subsistence, and by gaining price sovereignty, commoners can selectively trade with markets knowing that such interactions will not jeopardize the integrity of the commons itself. Commoners who, for example, participate in a commons of shareable research or databases, or reap the harvest from a cooperative farm, or live on an urban parcel or acreage held by a land trust, are insulated from the often harsh demands of debt and high prices.

The Linux operating system is another example of a commons asserting price sovereignty in its dealings with the market. Because it is available to anyone at no cost, commercial distributors of branded version of Linux are constrained in what they can charge. Similarly, open access scholarly journals such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) bypass the market entirely, making high-quality, peer-reviewed scientific research available for free. To be sure, PLoS journals rely on public funding to pay their costs as open access periodicals, but the point is that they have the price sovereignty to charge whatever price they want, including no price. This has put pressure on commercial journal publishers to offer their own open access journals (which, however, often charge excessive upfront author’s fees to publish works). Open access journals can succeed by out-cooperating commercial journals.

* * *

Once commoners pool their resources, should they Share, Divide Up, or Mutualize them? Each has different implications, but in general, any of these approaches is likely to reduce individual costs. Each is also more likely to meet people’s needs while developing a sense of co-responsibility for the entire provisioning process and its impacts. To summarize this discussion, here is a chart showing the different ways of allocating resources in a commons.

* * *

General types of allocation on Commons

General types of allocation in a capitalist market economy

Use Convivial Tools

The term “convivial tools” was introduced by the social critic and philosopher Ivan Illich in his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality, which described a vision of a world in which a community of users develop and maintain their own tools. Using convivial tools — a term that we extend to technologies, infrastructures, and processes for provisioning —
is about enhancing our individual freedom while enriching our relationships and interdependence — the essence of a commons.

Use Convivial Tools

Many contemporary tools and technologies are closed systems that lock us into their particular way of performing a task. Think of a factory assembly line, genetically modified crops, or an encrypted DVD. Such systems structure how we are allowed to work and relate to others, while making us dependent on control-minded corporations or state bureaucracies. By contrast, convivial tools are open-ended systems that anyone can use and adapt for their own purposes, in their own ways. As Illich explains:

Tools foster conviviality to the extent that they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action.22

Techniques for stable, eco-responsible agriculture such as permaculture and agroecology are convivial tools because anyone can use and share them, and contribute to their improvement. GMO seeds that have been genetically engineered and patented, by contrast, can only be used as mandated by the corporate owner. A free or open source computer operating system such as GNU/Linux can be used, shared, and modified however a person wishes, whereas Microsoft Windows® and Apple’s iOS® prohibit users from even looking at the source code of the program without permission. Convivial tools invite creative adaptations in a myriad of contexts. They deepen connections among people and with the Earth. They help bring about small, incremental, and socially appropriate solutions to problems. People can use them to escape institutional systems that inhibit our humanity and create dependencies.

The social character of our tools and technologies matter because, as Illich wrote, “Any individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image.” Ultimately, the tools we use shape the kind of society that is possible. “The result of much economic development,” writes Illich, “is very often not human flourishing but ‘modernized poverty,’ dependency, and an out-of-control system in which the humans become worn-out mechanical parts.”23 This dynamic is reaching alarming new extremes as a new surge of artificial intelligence technologies reach into our family life, households, personal health, and consciousness.

In our times, open source tools and technologies are convivial tools with great potential for Provisioning through Commons because users can determine how they will be used. They are open, accessible, modifiable, and shareable based on user wants and needs.24 Convivial tools allow for many applications, some very different from the originally intended use.

Rely on Distributed Structures

There is no inherent reason that commons cannot work at larger scales, as we have seen with countless networked communities that rely on internet platforms. Making a commons grow, however, requires not only political support, but also discrimination-free structures and infrastructures that make commoning easier. People must have fairly simple means to participate and give their consent, and systems must be devised to engender social trust, shared purpose, and coherence. Such (infra)structures need to be available for distributed use, when possible — 
e.g., peer-to-peer (open source software), team-to-team (Buurtzorg neighborhood home care), or node-to node structures (FairCoop). This means that the (infra)structures should enable peers, teams, and local nodes to interconnect and form semi-autonomous spheres of self-provisioning and -governance. Each part of the whole can then operate semi-autonomously, according to its own distinct rules and situational needs, while also coordinating with their other semi-autonomous peers.

Distributed structures differ from decentralized structures in that the latter are connected to central hubs whereas the former are interconnected peers (or teams, groups, nodes, or local commons) that relate directly to each other through a network or a federation, without a central hub.25 Distributed structures tend to behave more autonomously and enjoy greater self-determination. This helps prevent the consolidation of political power and render coercive, command-and-control authority systems unnecessary, but it does require initiative, creativity, and self-responsibility. Decentralized structures usually relate to a more authoritarian central body (municipality to states to a national government; franchisees to the corporate headquarters) and thus cede some of their autonomy, imagination, and potential to it.

In modern times, many institutional infrastructures and tools — law, bureaucracy, the internet — have been used to enlarge the size of stable, functional groups. While this has enabled the creation of modern institutions, it has also facilitated the centralization of power at the expense of individual participants and local knowledge. The challenge, then, is to transform and adapt modern institutions so that they can support human empowerment and conviviality.

Can the commons coordinate large numbers of people across large geographies while retaining a convivial human scale? The answer is yes, but this generally requires some infrastructure to enable partici­pants to reap the advantages of both distributed self-determination and larger-scale cooperation. This is essentially how many transnational projects are now operating. Examples include the Wikimedia Foundation’s funding and coordination of more than a dozen quasi-
autonomous wiki projects with commoners dispersed around the world; major open source software communities whose foundations and shared platforms enable small armies of programmers to show bottom-up initiative; and citizen-led movements such as the Transition Towns, and open design and manufacturing, which function at local scales yet coordinate across political jurisdictions.

The goal in each case is not to consolidate management through a central body, but to enter into a process of Emulate & Then Federate using digital networks. Power and creativity can then be dispersed locally or regionally while retaining important elements of large-scale coordination.

Creatively Adapt & Renew

Modern industrial culture has placed such a premium on “innovation” —
fueled in large part by an endless quest for competitive advantage — that innovation is often seen as an absolute good in itself. In such a world, its general goal is to help businesses prevail against competitors in the marketplace, improve return on investment, and entice consumers to buy an endless stream of “new and improved” products. By contrast, the commons as a system of provisioning is often considered backward, premodern, or tribal — ways of producing things that are seen as static, stodgy, and not innovative.

This is a gross caricature if not untruth because many commoners are extremely capable of adapting to changing needs, including the need to reduce one’s ecological footprint. In a commons, there is no imperative to constantly expand production and profit, and so creativity can be focused on what really matters — ameliorating quality, durability, resilience, and holistic stability. Innovation need not be linked to boosting market sales and ignoring planetary health. Countless commons exhibit the pattern of Creatively Adapt & Renew as part of their everyday activity.

As Eric von Hippel shows in his book Democratizing Innovation, all sorts of practitioner-communities — bicyclists, hang-gliders, skiers, extreme sports buffs — have developed breakthrough ideas that were later commercialized by conventional businesses.26 Indigenous peoples, too — long considered fixed and traditional in their ways — have shown immense creativity over the centuries in co-creating robust ecosystems through seed-breeding and animal domestication. The fertile soil in the Amazon region known as terra preta do indio — “dark earth of the Indians” — writes political economist James Boyce, “is not a random anomaly, but rather a deliberate creation of Indigenous farmers who long ago practiced ‘slash-and-char’ agroforestry in the region. A noteworthy feature of terra preta is its remarkable capacity for self-regeneration, which scientists attribute to soil microorganisms.”27 Such practices can also be seen in the creation of gravity-fed acequia irrigation in the upper Rio Grande valley, which transformed the semi-arid region into a rich landscape of wetlands, cultivated fields, and riparian corridors that allowed many animal species to flourish. The ETC Group, an organization that studies technological innovation, has called such creativity “Indigenous innovation” and “cooperative innovation”28 because Indigenous peoples have made countless ethnobotanical and ecological discoveries that transnational corporations have later sought to appropriate for free and privatize (“biopiracy”).

Commoners survive through creative adaptation and renewal. It is in their blood. They habitually have to make do with what is available and improvise. Among peasants and poor people in India, there is a word for such innovation — jugaad — the Indian practice of slapdash innovation from whatever is at hand.29 Creative adaptation, in truth, is a part of the human condition. Struggle and need induce creativity as a matter of survival.

* * *

The patterns of Provisioning that we have described here are dynamic and alive — which means that new configurations of commoning often emerge. One of the most salient in recent times is the rise of what many call cosmo-local production. People share “light” knowledge and design via peer-to-peer learning and the internet, but build “heavy” physical things such as machinery, cars, housing, furniture, and electronics locally. In the peer production community there is a saying, “If it’s light, share it globally — if it’s heavy, produce it locally.”

This phenomenon is taking many forms. Imagine a Cuban farmer working with peers from India and Peru to figure out ways to improve rice yields, a routine practice among farmers associated with SRI, the System of Rice Intensification. Or imagine designers in Amsterdam working with engineers and architects in Australia and the US to design low-cost, modular housing that anyone can build with local supplies. This is now a working norm among participants in the global Wikihouse network. There is a long tradition of cosmo-local cooperation in agriculture, as seen in such networks as Campesino a Campesino. This is an international mutual aid project that peasant farmers started in Guatemala in the early 1970s as a self-help alternative to multinational development interventions.30 Or consider Masipag, a nonprofit partnership between resource-poor farmers and scientists at research institutions around the world, devoted to breeding and cultivating locally adapted seeds.31

In recent years, digital technologies have greatly empowered global collaborations that have local outputs. Global communities of designers, engineers, and programmers are collaborating online to develop design prototypes for everything from farm equipment (tractors, wind turbines, rototillers and soil pulverizers, compressed earth block presses for brickmaking)32 to high-end scientific microscopes (OpenSPIM)33 to sailing robots to detect ocean pollution (Scoutbots).34 All of these machines are licensed to be shareable, open source style. This means that any farmer, scientific researcher, or curious amateur can take advantage of world-class innovation by building their own tools less expensively using modular, adaptable, locally sourceable materials.

Open Source Ecology is one such project that designs diverse non-proprietary types of farm equipment and machinery that can be locally produced. The project started in 2003 in the USA and now has local hubs in Germany, Guatemala, and other locations around the world. An array of architects, engineers, and designers with the WikiHouse project have developed an “open source construction kit” that is akin to “a big IKEA kit for your home that is easy to assemble and affordable.” In a similar vein, the Open Building Institute, an offshoot of Open Source Ecology, builds low-cost, modular houses that are ecological and energy-efficient using techniques that are open source, convivial, and distributed. These remarkable forms of “cosmopolitan localism,” as Wolfgang Sachs puts it,35 could not work without convivial tools.

The same dynamics of cosmo-local provisioning can be seen in the Wikispeed project, which is building a next-generation mail delivery vehicle and taxi cab, among other vehicles, using open source principles at a global scale. Also notable is Arduino, a global open source community that designs easy-to-use hardware and software systems for 3D printing, education, wearable computing, and Internet of Things applications, among other tasks.

Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation and a leading theorist of peer production, divides cosmo-local production into three distinct stages: input, process, and output. The input (resources, talent, creativity) comes from voluntary contributors who do not have to ask permission to participate. They can use “open and free raw material that is free of restrictive copyright so that it can be freely improved and modified,” writes Bauwens.36 The process is an open, peer-production system that is designed to be inclusive. There are “low thresholds for participation, freely available modular tasks rather than functional jobs, and communal validation of the quality and excellence of the alternatives,” Bauwens explains.

Finally, the output is licensed to ensure that the value generated by the commons will be available to all — again, without permission. Commonly used licenses include the General Public License for software, Creative Commons licenses for various forms of content, and the Peer Production License. The commons that the peer community creates is used, in turn, to create a new layer of open and free material that can be used for a next iteration. In general, open global design combined with local manufacturing has profound implications for potentially reducing the material throughput in the production process and especially the energy required for transportation. The authors of a 2017 report argue that “mutualization and relocalization” are “answers to the problem of nonrenewable materials.”37

Part III:
Growing the Commonsverse

Introduction

We have come a long way. Part I explained the importance of an OntoShift for understanding the insurgent power of the commons, and how language is an indispensable tool in helping us shed archaic understandings and cultivate commons-friendly perspectives. Then, in Part II, we introduced the Triad of Commoning as a way to explain how people can enact commons by emulating existing patterns of social life, peer governance, and provisioning. These first six chapters give us a fairly solid grasp of the dynamics of commoning. They explain how — within a commons — people can produce a world that is free, fair, and alive.

But as capitalism teeters under the weight of its own contradictions, leading to such existential crises as climate breakdown, economic inequality, and violent nationalism, an obvious question on the lips of most people is, how can the Commonsverse grow larger and transform the political economy and culture? How can we achieve changes in state power, law, and policy based on a commons approach? These questions are the focus of Part III.

It turns out that patterns of commoning, especially of peer governance, are crucial not only within a commons, but equally in handling relationships among commons. At both levels, it is important to Bring Diversity into Shared Purpose, Assure Consent in Decision Making, and Share Knowledge Generously, among other patterns identified in the Triad of Commoning. However, as commons grow and spawn a varied ecosystem of players, a new set of complications arises. Each separate commons must learn to connect and coordinate with others based on the commons ethic described in Part II. This requires new forms of cooperation not just within commons (the “micro” level) but in the spaces among individual commons (the “meso” level) and in complicated struggles and negotiations at the societal level (the “macro” level). This tripartite division of levels is too tidy a description because the dynamics at each level are all intertwined. It is nonetheless a useful way of conceptualizing how commons fit into a larger societal context.

Four strategies are particularly important. First, commoners must learn how to Beat the Bounds of their commons to prevent enclosure and/or reclaim privatized wealth. This is a basic survival imperative. Beating the bounds, you may recall, is the practice used by many English villages of walking the perimeter of their land to identify any fences or hedges that had encroached upon their shared wealth. In our times, beating the bounds may initially involve direct action resistance and civil disobedience against enclosures, and attempts to “de-enclose” them. The point of beating the bounds is to restore some measure of commoning with respect to land, water, seeds, code, creative work, and culture, and to restore the integrity of the community. Such tactics may be followed by longer-term strategies such as enacting laws, developing technological safeguards, or adopting protective social traditions. Institutional stability and legal security are fundamental.

But this is only a start. As the number of commons in a given field of endeavor increases, it is important for commoners to Emulate & Federate to build more integrated, collaborative networks and shared infrastructures. That is the approach used by La Via Campesina, the decentralized grassroots movement of millions of peasants, small farmers, landless people, rural women and youth, Indigenous peoples, and migrants and agricultural workers. The movement amounts to a large, loosely connected transnational federation. Similarly, community-supported agriculture farms in Germany (known by the German acronym SoLaWi) have federated as the Netzwerk Solidarische Landwirtschaft, following the growth of CSA farms in Germany from three in 2003 to thirty-nine in 2013 to about two hundred in early 2019. The purpose of the federation is to allow individual farms to trade insights, jointly sponsor research, develop new initiatives, connect commoners and farmers, and write shareable free software specifically designed to meet CSA needs. In digital spaces, there are many collaborations among commons involving free and open source software, Creative Commons licenses, open access scholarly publishing, the open educational resources movement, and open data initiatives, among other free culture projects. Participants in one community of practice keep loose track of advances in other communities, — such as new user interfaces, security protocols, or sharing behaviors — and adapt them within their own context.

These federations, whether organized or casual, do not function as representative bodies in any formal sense. They are shared spaces for forging mutual commitments. They are evolving heterarchies of mutual aid, consensus building, and joint action among commoners. The goal of federations is to fortify the many individual commons while building collaborative ventures such as shared infrastructure, finance, and political advocacy.

Beyond the activities of Emulate & Federate, it is important for commons projects and networks to pursue strategies of intercommoning. This is the process of active collaboration and mutual support to assist and inspire individual projects, make sense of unfolding events, and develop proactive strategies. All that’s needed is an open space in which people who would not otherwise meet can come together to work freely on self-determined agendas: hackers with farmers, for example, or low-income people with makerspaces, or open educational resources advocates with co-housing residents. The process of intercommoning also builds a shared culture, particularly as a new language of the commons takes root.

Why is all this needed? Because the harsh realities of the market/state system otherwise impede the development of commoning. State power is real and dominant, and generally privileges capitalist modes of production and culture as normative. It elevates legal frameworks that honor private property, capitalist-driven market transactions, and contracts among individuals. So if anyone wishes to advance an OntoShift, they must find ingenious ways to deal with some deeply rooted biases of the capitalist economy that are reflected in various structures of state power, law, policy, and socially embedded markets.

This is a formidable challenge, indeed! However, the hardy survival of many commons over the centuries suggests that they are not without their own remarkable powers of creative self-protection and expansion. It’s just that commoners generally do not have the support of conventional law, finance, technology, and state power that players in the market economy take for granted.

The next chapters therefore embark upon a bold quest. We try to imagine how state power and law might begin to support commons in both operational and structural ways. However, unlike many proposals that focus on enacting new laws, regulations, or state programs to change existing market or state structures — a setup for disappointing results — we propose a Grand Strategy that draws its energy and strength from the ontological shift and the patterns of commoning introduced earlier. In other words, politics, state law, and policy will not be the primary drivers of change. Commoning will. A great deal can be achieved right now without having to become embroiled in the compromises, betrayals, co-optation, and legal paralysis of conventional politics and government. This is not to say that politics and state powers can be ignored or utterly avoided; it is simply to declare that commoning must lie at the heart of any strategies for change. Politics must remain a means to an end, and not an end in itself. The best way to avoid the seductions of politics and state power, which have often co-opted leaders and derailed social movements, is to hew closely to patterns of commoning, even in macro-scale endeavors.

A fair question to ask is whether the powers of commoning can truly be transformational. How can we know if commoning can actually provide leverage points for a Great Transition away from state-supported market fundamentalism to something better? Geographer Dina Hestad of the University of Oxford has studied what characteristics must be present for actions and strategies to be socially transformative. She has provisionally identified the following criteria:1

• Work towards a vision which reflects the need to live in balance with the carrying capacity of the earth
• Consider that change in a complex system cannot be controlled due to uncertainty
• Avoid displacing problems to other locations or times, which could prevent wider system change
• Tackle the root causes of acceleration and growth — the feedback loops that cause most of today’s ecological and social crises
• Work towards systems that avoid unchecked imbalances of power and help avoid triggering humans’ (destructive) ancient tribal circuits
• Promote understanding that humans are part of a much larger whole, and create possibilities for resonance and meaningful, affective relationships between people and nature
• Develop healthy human agency at individual and collective levels for transforming and co-creating our future
• Open up new possibilities for acting rather than shrinking our opportunities to act
• Communicate a compelling and inspiring story of system change that names the problems and identifies commensurate leverage points and resonates with people from all walks of life and across ideologies
• Promote social cohesion and a sense of togetherness at different levels, which includes trust, a sense of belonging, and a willingness to participate and help
• Promote critical thinking, generosity of spirit, and openness to learn from diverse ideas and perspectives

Commoning has a rich potential to meet all of these criteria. Of course, implementation is critical! That is to say, strengthening and expanding commoning from within a market/state polity will be really difficult. But it is entirely feasible. The following four chapters of Part III offers some broad recommendations.

* * *

In proposing ways that state power can support commoning, we hasten to call attention to what we are not proposing. We are not trying to re-imagine the polity. We are not trying to reinvent the nation-state, much as that may be needed. We are not trying to smash capitalism in a traditional revolutionary sense, although of course any advance of the commons diminishes its power and represents an incremental triumph. The commons surely has a lot to say about these challenges, philosophically and politically. But one cannot simply propose a grandiose, long-term agenda and then try to educate others to agree and follow the prescribed insights. That approach ignores the deeper wisdom of the commons, which accepts the idea of distributed, local, and diverse acts of commoning whose very aliveness produces the creativity and commitment to develop solutions adapted to every context.

In this sense, the long-term agenda must be one of emergence through commoning. Our priority must be to grow the capacity to think like a commoner and to grow the Commonsverse as much as possible now, planting seeds of culture, social practice, and institutional power that can unfold in the fullness of time. It is this developmental unfolding of the ethics of commoning that makes it so hardy in the first place. It is this dynamic that we need to honor and develop rather than plunging prematurely or naively into frontal assaults on a highly fortified market/state system, a strategy doomed to fail.

The most natural opening for cooperation between state power and commoners is the local level. In smaller-scale political contexts, government tends to be less driven by ideology or party politics than by sheer practicality — what works? At the local level, politicians cannot so easily ignore needs nor hide behind ideology. Moreover, people at the local level can more easily make their political voices heard and pressure governments to innovate, as seen in the burgeoning “city as a commons” movement in Europe and dozens of urban commons initiatives documented by Shareable magazine.2 It is no accident that the words “commons” and “municipality” share the same etymology with the root Latin word munus, which combines the meanings “gift” and “duty.” Our challenge is to find ways to reinvent this ethic in the larger modern state structures in which we are inexorably entangled. Let’s begin.

Introduction

We have come a long way. Part I explained the importance of an OntoShift for understanding the insurgent power of the commons, and how language is an indispensable tool in helping us shed archaic understandings and cultivate commons-friendly perspectives. Then, in Part II, we introduced the Triad of Commoning as a way to explain how people can enact commons by emulating existing patterns of social life, peer governance, and provisioning. These first six chapters give us a fairly solid grasp of the dynamics of commoning. They explain how — within a commons — people can produce a world that is free, fair, and alive.

But as capitalism teeters under the weight of its own contradictions, leading to such existential crises as climate breakdown, economic inequality, and violent nationalism, an obvious question on the lips of most people is, how can the Commonsverse grow larger and transform the political economy and culture? How can we achieve changes in state power, law, and policy based on a commons approach? These questions are the focus of Part III.

It turns out that patterns of commoning, especially of peer governance, are crucial not only within a commons, but equally in handling relationships among commons. At both levels, it is important to Bring Diversity into Shared Purpose, Assure Consent in Decision Making, and Share Knowledge Generously, among other patterns identified in the Triad of Commoning. However, as commons grow and spawn a varied ecosystem of players, a new set of complications arises. Each separate commons must learn to connect and coordinate with others based on the commons ethic described in Part II. This requires new forms of cooperation not just within commons (the “micro” level) but in the spaces among individual commons (the “meso” level) and in complicated struggles and negotiations at the societal level (the “macro” level). This tripartite division of levels is too tidy a description because the dynamics at each level are all intertwined. It is nonetheless a useful way of conceptualizing how commons fit into a larger societal context.

Four strategies are particularly important. First, commoners must learn how to Beat the Bounds of their commons to prevent enclosure and/or reclaim privatized wealth. This is a basic survival imperative. Beating the bounds, you may recall, is the practice used by many English villages of walking the perimeter of their land to identify any fences or hedges that had encroached upon their shared wealth. In our times, beating the bounds may initially involve direct action resistance and civil disobedience against enclosures, and attempts to “de-enclose” them. The point of beating the bounds is to restore some measure of commoning with respect to land, water, seeds, code, creative work, and culture, and to restore the integrity of the community. Such tactics may be followed by longer-term strategies such as enacting laws, developing technological safeguards, or adopting protective social traditions. Institutional stability and legal security are fundamental.

But this is only a start. As the number of commons in a given field of endeavor increases, it is important for commoners to Emulate & Federate to build more integrated, collaborative networks and shared infrastructures. That is the approach used by La Via Campesina, the decentralized grassroots movement of millions of peasants, small farmers, landless people, rural women and youth, Indigenous peoples, and migrants and agricultural workers. The movement amounts to a large, loosely connected transnational federation. Similarly, community-supported agriculture farms in Germany (known by the German acronym SoLaWi) have federated as the Netzwerk Solidarische Landwirtschaft, following the growth of CSA farms in Germany from three in 2003 to thirty-nine in 2013 to about two hundred in early 2019. The purpose of the federation is to allow individual farms to trade insights, jointly sponsor research, develop new initiatives, connect commoners and farmers, and write shareable free software specifically designed to meet CSA needs. In digital spaces, there are many collaborations among commons involving free and open source software, Creative Commons licenses, open access scholarly publishing, the open educational resources movement, and open data initiatives, among other free culture projects. Participants in one community of practice keep loose track of advances in other communities, — such as new user interfaces, security protocols, or sharing behaviors — and adapt them within their own context.

These federations, whether organized or casual, do not function as representative bodies in any formal sense. They are shared spaces for forging mutual commitments. They are evolving heterarchies of mutual aid, consensus building, and joint action among commoners. The goal of federations is to fortify the many individual commons while building collaborative ventures such as shared infrastructure, finance, and political advocacy.

Beyond the activities of Emulate & Federate, it is important for commons projects and networks to pursue strategies of intercommoning. This is the process of active collaboration and mutual support to assist and inspire individual projects, make sense of unfolding events, and develop proactive strategies. All that’s needed is an open space in which people who would not otherwise meet can come together to work freely on self-determined agendas: hackers with farmers, for example, or low-income people with makerspaces, or open educational resources advocates with co-housing residents. The process of intercommoning also builds a shared culture, particularly as a new language of the commons takes root.

Why is all this needed? Because the harsh realities of the market/state system otherwise impede the development of commoning. State power is real and dominant, and generally privileges capitalist modes of production and culture as normative. It elevates legal frameworks that honor private property, capitalist-driven market transactions, and contracts among individuals. So if anyone wishes to advance an OntoShift, they must find ingenious ways to deal with some deeply rooted biases of the capitalist economy that are reflected in various structures of state power, law, policy, and socially embedded markets.

This is a formidable challenge, indeed! However, the hardy survival of many commons over the centuries suggests that they are not without their own remarkable powers of creative self-protection and expansion. It’s just that commoners generally do not have the support of conventional law, finance, technology, and state power that players in the market economy take for granted.

The next chapters therefore embark upon a bold quest. We try to imagine how state power and law might begin to support commons in both operational and structural ways. However, unlike many proposals that focus on enacting new laws, regulations, or state programs to change existing market or state structures — a setup for disappointing results — we propose a Grand Strategy that draws its energy and strength from the ontological shift and the patterns of commoning introduced earlier. In other words, politics, state law, and policy will not be the primary drivers of change. Commoning will. A great deal can be achieved right now without having to become embroiled in the compromises, betrayals, co-optation, and legal paralysis of conventional politics and government. This is not to say that politics and state powers can be ignored or utterly avoided; it is simply to declare that commoning must lie at the heart of any strategies for change. Politics must remain a means to an end, and not an end in itself. The best way to avoid the seductions of politics and state power, which have often co-opted leaders and derailed social movements, is to hew closely to patterns of commoning, even in macro-scale endeavors.

A fair question to ask is whether the powers of commoning can truly be transformational. How can we know if commoning can actually provide leverage points for a Great Transition away from state-supported market fundamentalism to something better? Geographer Dina Hestad of the University of Oxford has studied what characteristics must be present for actions and strategies to be socially transformative. She has provisionally identified the following criteria:1

• Work towards a vision which reflects the need to live in balance with the carrying capacity of the earth
• Consider that change in a complex system cannot be controlled due to uncertainty
• Avoid displacing problems to other locations or times, which could prevent wider system change
• Tackle the root causes of acceleration and growth — the feedback loops that cause most of today’s ecological and social crises
• Work towards systems that avoid unchecked imbalances of power and help avoid triggering humans’ (destructive) ancient tribal circuits
• Promote understanding that humans are part of a much larger whole, and create possibilities for resonance and meaningful, affective relationships between people and nature
• Develop healthy human agency at individual and collective levels for transforming and co-creating our future
• Open up new possibilities for acting rather than shrinking our opportunities to act
• Communicate a compelling and inspiring story of system change that names the problems and identifies commensurate leverage points and resonates with people from all walks of life and across ideologies
• Promote social cohesion and a sense of togetherness at different levels, which includes trust, a sense of belonging, and a willingness to participate and help
• Promote critical thinking, generosity of spirit, and openness to learn from diverse ideas and perspectives

Commoning has a rich potential to meet all of these criteria. Of course, implementation is critical! That is to say, strengthening and expanding commoning from within a market/state polity will be really difficult. But it is entirely feasible. The following four chapters of Part III offers some broad recommendations.

* * *

In proposing ways that state power can support commoning, we hasten to call attention to what we are not proposing. We are not trying to re-imagine the polity. We are not trying to reinvent the nation-state, much as that may be needed. We are not trying to smash capitalism in a traditional revolutionary sense, although of course any advance of the commons diminishes its power and represents an incremental triumph. The commons surely has a lot to say about these challenges, philosophically and politically. But one cannot simply propose a grandiose, long-term agenda and then try to educate others to agree and follow the prescribed insights. That approach ignores the deeper wisdom of the commons, which accepts the idea of distributed, local, and diverse acts of commoning whose very aliveness produces the creativity and commitment to develop solutions adapted to every context.

In this sense, the long-term agenda must be one of emergence through commoning. Our priority must be to grow the capacity to think like a commoner and to grow the Commonsverse as much as possible now, planting seeds of culture, social practice, and institutional power that can unfold in the fullness of time. It is this developmental unfolding of the ethics of commoning that makes it so hardy in the first place. It is this dynamic that we need to honor and develop rather than plunging prematurely or naively into frontal assaults on a highly fortified market/state system, a strategy doomed to fail.

The most natural opening for cooperation between state power and commoners is the local level. In smaller-scale political contexts, government tends to be less driven by ideology or party politics than by sheer practicality — what works? At the local level, politicians cannot so easily ignore needs nor hide behind ideology. Moreover, people at the local level can more easily make their political voices heard and pressure governments to innovate, as seen in the burgeoning “city as a commons” movement in Europe and dozens of urban commons initiatives documented by Shareable magazine.2 It is no accident that the words “commons” and “municipality” share the same etymology with the root Latin word munus, which combines the meanings “gift” and “duty.” Our challenge is to find ways to reinvent this ethic in the larger modern state structures in which we are inexorably entangled. Let’s begin.

7. Rethinking Property

To visit downtown Florence these days is to walk amidst dozens of lovingly restored fourteenth to eighteenth-century buildings and public squares, the Galleria dell’Accademia containing Michelangelo’s statue of David, the priceless art of the Uffizi Museum, overpriced cafés and gaudy souvenir shops pandering to tourists. But look more closely, right behind the apse of the Carmine church, on the other side of the Arno River, where the Renaissance began, and you will discover the last part of the old town that has not yet been turned into a Disneyland of the Renaissance.

This neighborhood, the San Frediano parish, is only a few steps away from the world-famous Ponte Vecchio. Even though it is within an area of gentrification, a startled visitor who stumbles across the Nidiaci Community Garden will encounter, especially in the afternoons, a leafy oasis filled with energetic, noisy children and their parents. Rambunctious six-year-olds race around the grounds and play on swings while their older brothers take lessons with the city’s only self-managed soccer school, “The Lebowskis.” On certain days, a Portuguese musician who lives nearby teaches violin to children. On other days, a British writer teaches English in a studio space on the grounds. Families organize free swaps of outgrown children’s clothes. Some residents tend to a small vegetable garden. Others have organized a project to monitor city pollution and traffic.

This space of togetherness, tucked away in a corner of the central city, is stewarded as a commons. Its use “depends on what people decide to put into it,” as Miguel Martinez, an amateur historian of the Nidiaci garden put it. “It’s hard to say what we are doing there, because everything depends on what new arrivals want to create.” But in a neighborhood in which about forty percent of the children come from families born abroad, simply having a space to common is no small blessing.

How is it possible, you might ask, that this beautiful spot in the center of Florence — easily worth more than several million dollars on the real estate market — has not yet been sold to the highest bidder and turned into condos? How is it that a group of neighbors actually stewards this space? When we went looking for answers to these questions, we learned a great deal about how property law can be used for more than the buying and selling of real estate; it can be used to help people lead a more satisfying community life.

The land now occupied by the Nidiaci Community Garden has a long and complicated history of ownership. It was originally donated to the Carmelite church by a widow in 1273, nationalized by the Napoleonic mayor of Florence in the nineteenth century, and later sold to a private owner. What started out as a private donation to the church became public property before becoming private property again. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the land was again sold to two individuals, one of whom rented it to the municipality of Florence for use as an elementary school.

Then, something critical happened. Although the details are murky, the owner of the land in 1920, the head of the American Red Cross mission in Italy, Edward Otis Bartlett, donated it to a trust charged with using the land “for popular education, with special attention to children.” Ownership of the property was now tied to a social mission, providing a play space for children. In 1954, after trusteeship of the land had passed to another generation, most of the land was donated to the municipality of Florence, becoming public property once again. But because legal documents declaring the intended social uses for the land were lost or never kept in the first place — and perhaps because the later generations of trustees had commercial intentions for the land — city authorities had allowed a building and part of the garden to fall into the hands of real estate investors, who then tried to build luxury apartments and a parking lot on the site.

Thanks to some dogged legal sleuthing by neighborhood residents in the 1990s, a document from the 1920s was found showing that the land was supposed to be managed for the benefit of children. Families of the San Frediano district mounted public protests in 2011
to try to restore the trust but failed. However, the city — eager to save money and stung by neighborhood protests — agreed to let residents manage the garden themselves, at their own risk, expense, and responsibility. A neighborhood association was formed to sign a legal convention with the city to keep the space available to people, without cost to the city administration. It resembles similar agreements for other neighborhood gardens in Florence in which residents were authorized to act as custodians of the gardens. But the city government retained the right to revoke access at any moment through an unappealable decision. Commoning at Nidiaci Gardens can continue, but it remains legally vulnerable — the fate of countless commons around the world.

* * *

There are thousands of such stories of people trying to find legal protection for their commoning. The stories are different, but tend to be similar in at least two respects. First, legal forms matter because they privilege certain uses of the things around us and certain social relations. And second, the social reality of commoning must precede any property forms. The recovery of the Nidiaci Garden happened in the first place only because neighborhood residents organized to press for appropriate legal and political solutions. Legal forms matter because, as we see in the Nidiaci Gardens history, a trust can be a better legal vehicle than state property for advancing the goals of the donor and neighborhood residents. Even though the Nidiaci commoners prevailed in one sense (commoning is now possible there), they came to understand that there was really no suitable form of property law to protect the social relations they wish to cultivate.

This is usually the case. Commoners routinely must rely on “alien” legal forms to protect their shared wealth and community culture. For example, software programmers who wanted to assure that their code could be shared and modified by anyone — free and open source software — discovered that they had to engineer a “legal hack” on copyright law, which is normally used to turn creative works into private property. (More on this on pp. 258–260.) When American entrepreneur Douglas Tompkins wanted to preserve more than two million acres of wilderness in Chile and Argentina, there was no legal instrument to manage it as a commons. He had to buy the land as private property and donate it to a private land trust, which later gave the land to the governments of those two nations to administer as public property. Sometimes a group of farmers may make a local diner their favorite hangout, or bikers and football fans in a given city will make a certain bar their favored place. But the owners of such private commercial establishments may have their own ideas about to manage these de facto social commons, perhaps leading to tensions between the property owners and the users.

As these examples suggest, property law and commoning are not generally made for each other. That’s more or less the problem that Nidiaci commoners faced: they were not able to acquire clear title to the land or secure a legal vehicle that recognized their vernacular practices. But they got lucky — they were able to work out a deal that lets them use and peer-govern the space for children and families. They secured the municipal government’s legal permission, and for the purposes of commoning, that was enough, at least in the short term. But it is certainly not a reliable legal solution over the long term. Faced with existing frameworks of property law, commoners who wish to legalize their Peer Governance may have little choice but to attempt to creatively modify the law or turn to political pressure, social organizing, or civil disobedience.1

This should not be surprising. Guardians of the dominant economic and social order naturally see property law as an instrument to advance their interests. When early capitalism enclosed the commons and overrode customary practices, writes historian E.P. Thompson, the “political economy aided and abetted the law.”2 Property law was an essential tool of dispossession. In our time, a similar dynamic is at work, as we see in copyright laws that lock research away from the scholars who produced it, patent laws that prohibit farmers from sharing seeds, and large corporations that ravage local landscapes to extract fossil fuels. As the great political scientist and philosopher C.B. Macpherson once wrote:

For when the liberal property right is written into law as an individual right to the exclusive use and disposal of parcels of the resources provided by nature and of parcels of capital created by past work on them, and when it is combined with the liberal system of market incentives and the rights of free contract, it leads to and supports a concentration of ownership and a system of power relations […] which negates the ethical goal of free and independent individual development.”3 (emphasis in original)

In short, the combination of property law with capitalist markets and state enforcement of contracts has created a powerful narrative of freedom — but a freedom that is mostly reserved for owners. If we really want to be free, and we wish everyone to enjoy that possibility, we need to rethink property.

This is a very large and complicated topic, of course. It is not easy to imagine how we might subordinate property rights to the needs of our society and ecosystems, reversing the power of tradeable property to dictate terms for nearly everything. Chapters Seven and Eight are devoted to this ambitious challenge. We start by rethinking some fundamental dimensions of property that have long been neglected or ignored, but which have great importance to commoning. Then, in Chapter Eight, we explore the possibilities and ways of relationalizing property. The point is not to abandon property law as such, but to situate the things we use (sometimes known to the law as “property”) in a rich, diverse, and meaning-making web of relationships — social, economic, ecological, temporal.4 The legal concepts of possession, custom, and inalienability are important in helping us rethink the meaning of property.

In rethinking property, it is vital that we understand a basic idea —
property is relational and not just an object. This insight opens the door to a richer, more realistic discussion of how property actually affects us and the world. We also need to recognize that familiar forms of collective property — trusts, coops, partnerships, nonprofits — can achieve a great deal, but they ultimately do not overcome the structural biases embedded in property itself: the right to exclude, the over-reliance on markets, the habit of equating value with price, and the power of owners to dictate how nature and people will be treated.5

In this chapter, we will also clarify why the notion of possession is so important to the commons. In an existential sense, we cannot not possess. But something interesting happens as we possess. As firsthand users of water, land, wood, soil, landscapes, seeds, and much more, we develop knowledge and affection, a sense of responsibility, and situated knowledge about the resource — enough to convert it into care-wealth. Such attitudes are less likely to develop among owners primarily focused on the exchange value of their property.

By focusing on possession, we can begin to think about ways of having that may not be officially sanctioned by legality (as at Nidiaci Garden), but which are entirely functional and effective. Moreover, we can begin to think about how state law might recognize or facilitate these other modes of possessing, collaborating, sharing, and commoning. This mode of having and using is what we call Relationalized Property — a topic we will develop in Chapter Eight.

Finally, we explore why inalienability is critical to any vision of stewardship through commoning. Inalienability is the idea that it is ethically offensive to appropriate and sell certain cherished things. As creatures of the market, we moderns generally dismiss this idea as archaic. But the legal history of inalienability, especially during the Roman Empire, shows how a prohibition on alienation enables all sorts of vital relationships to flourish precisely because limits are set on market activity.

Me, My Freedom, and My Property

It’s no exaggeration to say that our ideas about property express a vision of personhood — one that radiates into the deepest corners of society, affecting our social identities and relationships, commercial dealings, institutional behavior, and treatment of nature. “The premise underlying the personhood perspective,” writes property law scholar Margaret Jane Radin, “is that to achieve proper self-development — to be a person — an individual needs some control over resources in the external environment. The necessary assurances of control take the form of property rights.”6 But property is not just a reflection of our sense of what a human being is; it is a legal enactment of our social relations. A vast market apparatus ratifies and reinforces a culture based on property norms every day. Thus the juridical way that we think about property largely determines the actual social relations that we can imagine and develop. Of course, this happens in other realms of life, too: how we think about “the economy” also determines how we relate to each other.

For the past 250 years, modern, liberal notions of property have been the defining feature of our general archetype of personhood. John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and the other early theorists of the modern state and liberal property rights started with the assumption that the individual matters most, and that everyone is “proprietor of his person and capacities.”7 Most of Western culture has embraced the idea that freedom is “freedom from dependence on the wills of others, … and freedom is a function of possession. Society becomes a lot of free and equal individuals related to each other as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise. Society consists of exchange between proprietors.”8

This modern catechism of freedom anchors the cherished cultural ideal of individual autonomy and individual property. The human being is conceived as an isolated-I with absolute freedom, expressed through ownership. It is a world in which we stand as selves ultimately disconnected from everything else — community, tradition, ethnicity, religion, nature. In such a world, property ownership constitutes an institutional bulwark for the freedom of the utterly autonomous individual. These three ideas — the individual, property rights, and freedom — have become the pillars of free-market ideology and Western civilization. The linkage among the three defines a world in which individual property rights are seen as determining people’s “actual freedom and actual prospect of realizing their full potentialities.”9 Once this linkage was established as the dominant political theory — modern liberalism — it was read back into the nature of the individual as if it had always been there and was not culturally created. It was presented as a self-evident, universal fact.

By sanctifying this vision of humanity, modern property law functions as a massive system of social engineering. It elevates instrumental, commercial uses of nature. It encourages the treatment of human beings as commodified labor and the internalization of such norms as people learn to sell themselves on the labor market. It creates artificial scarcities through copyright and patent law to help create markets that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Property law as it is today systemically privileges the individual versus the collective, self-serving control over relationships, and exchange value over intrinsic or use value. One might say that the very premises of property law dictate these outcomes. This makes it difficult to entertain legal schemes that might reflect a broader array of human values, practices, and social organization.

How then might we inaugurate an OntoShift (as discussed in Chapter Two) and new approaches toward value to achieve a more life-
nurturing conceptualization of property?

Property is Relational

At the very moment we recognize our condition to be that of human beings in relatedness, it becomes clear that the default premise of property law — that everyone is absolutely autonomous and separate from each other and the Earth — is highly problematic if not silly. The three pillars of modern liberal society — 1) the lone individual and 2) property rights as the basis for 3) “contract freedom” — represent a fairly crude, narrow vision of human fulfillment and social order.

If we wish to recognize our actual interconnectedness and take it seriously, we must start to imagine new types of institutional and property arrangements that recognize this fact. If we acknowledge that the libertarian individual as a cultural ideal is a fantasy, then we need to begin to rethink the very concepts of “freedom” and “property” as now construed. We must reassess the idea that boundless individualism is truly liberating, that property rights are the best guarantor of freedom and social well-being, and that we can continue to pursue market growth in a world of ecological limits.

The prejudices in modern thinking about property go back a long way. In his famous 1753 treatise on property, the English jurist William Blackstone wrote, “There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property, that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”10 Blackstone’s notion of an individual as an obsessive, self-regarding owner is something of a caricature, of course. Moreover, he talks as if property were only an object — an idea that has been commonplace in Euro-American contexts. The only relevant relationship raised by property seems to be between a person and a thing, as in, “This bicycle belongs to me. I am its owner.” Because property law privileges the idea of the lone, disconnected individual and property as an object, it has trouble grappling with the relationships that lie at the heart of commoning and, indeed, life itself.

Blackstone’s quote is interesting for yet another reason. He bluntly notes that one is either an owner or a non-owner, which means that property rights create a social boundary in the first place. The statement, “This bicycle is mine. I am its owner,” is more accurately understood as, “This bicycle is mine, therefore I can decide if you can use it or not.” The legal connection between me and the bicycle privileges my entitlements and denies yours. In other words, the legal relationship (property ownership) profoundly shapes and determines social relationships. Property law determines who may decide how the bicycle may be used — if it can be sold, destroyed, altered, co-used, or parked in a garage, and under what terms. Legal ownership determines everything, but particularly, the right to exclude. The way we construct and apply property rights actually reveals much more about us and our relationships to others than about our relationships to the actual thing owned.

There are, of course, some significant exceptions to the unlimited freedom of “sole and despotic” ownership. Owners of land, for example, are subject to zoning laws that restrict how land may be used. Nuisance laws prevent owners from making too much noise or burning leaves. Building codes protect health and safety. And so on. Despite such limitations, the presumption that property rights confer absolute dominion remains the default norm. This idea contains a built-in conundrum, however. In real life, everyone’s property rights cannot be absolute, so there are inevitable conflicts about the scope of one’s rights. These conflicts cannot be resolved through the law alone, but only through politics. What is allowed and forbidden to owners and everyone else is essentially a “policy determination, not a matter of neutral deductive reasoning” by courts, notes one legal commenator.11 Law reflects the political and economic order.

The Federal Republic of Germany’s Constitution, known as Grundgesetz, actually has a provision (in paragraph 14.2) that stipulates, “Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good.”12 The philosopher who provided the main arguments for contemporary property law, John Locke, gives passing recognition to the social implications of individual ownership by stipulating that a property right is legitimate “only if there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.”13 This so-called “Lockean proviso” is an attempt to acknowledge that one person’s property rights may directly affect other people’s lives, but in practice the proviso has been largely ignored.14

As this legal history suggests, highlighting the general idea that property is relational is not that remarkable. It quickly becomes controversial, however, when it comes time to hammer out specific entitlements, their scope and term, and limitations. Then we get to the heart of the matter. We see that property law is not about making a general statement about normative relationships, it is all about enacting those relationships with the enforcement powers of the nation-state. We need to be clear that property law has no content in itself; it is the outcome of politics — a struggle to determine what sort of enforceable meanings “property” will have in law and what its legal disposition will be. In this way law both reflects and profoundly shapes and determines social relationships. Something significant happens when states affirm certain types of social relationships through such property laws as the right to own land, music, water, or images: It becomes difficult to question the moral justifications for ownership. After all, once a sovereign state throws its authority behind certain classes of property, it in effect forecloses any further discussion about the legitimacy of ownership.

This often leads to a disturbing gap between legality and legitimacy, a distinction used by French legal scholar Étienne Le Roy.15 Political and corporate elites embrace formal law, bureaucratic rules, jurisprudence — “legality” — while the experiences and vernacular norms and practices of ordinary people — “legitimacy” — go ignored. Farmers around the world consider it entirely legitimate to save and share seeds, and scholars and internet users generally want to share their knowledge with each other. However, to the guardians of legality, such activities are often regarded as criminal. Property rights must be defended. Legality is thus used to eclipse the Vernacular Law of the commons — the informal, unofficial norms, practices, and customs used by peer communities to manage their affairs.16 In this way, we can see how property is given a higher legal standing than possession, regardless of the legitimacy of the arguments for the latter. Because law has endorsed a certain social order of property through ordained state processes (legislatures, bureaucracies, courts), customary practice, tradition, and possession can be shunted aside as illegal, or at least suspect. Property ownership is lawful, but possession is not accorded the same level of protection.

Wesley N. Hohfeld was an early twentieth century law scholar who popularized the idea that each right conferred by property law corresponds to a “non-right” that afflicts others. Each time the law recognizes a right or a privilege for one person, it denies a corresponding right or privilege to somebody else. Any legal power for one is related to a legal disability imposed on others.17 Or as one property scholar put it: “Legal rights are not simply entitlements, but jural relations.”18 Because property is a complex set of legal relations that govern how people may interact “no person can enjoy complete freedom to use, possess, enjoy, or transfer assets regarded as theirs,” writes Gregory Alexander. And this means that “[s]ome degree of social interference with one person’s ownership interest not only does not negate ownership, it is unavoidable.”19 (emphasis in original)

This insight is more profound than it may seem. Property not only establishes a relationship between a bicycle owner and a bicycle, and between the bicycle owner and non-owners. It indirectly establishes a dense web of multiple relationships — with the people who mined the metal for the bicycle and produced the parts, with the manufacturer and retailer, with the person to whom you may have lent it, with people driving cars and bicycles on the road, and so on. An object designated as property is not just implicated in a complex web of social relations, but also in myriad other relationships such as with a local community, the ecosystem, nonhuman life, and future generations. Property law focuses on the rights of the owner and sometimes the direct effects on others; it is essentially a short-sighted, parochial viewpoint.

The serious limitations of property — the market individualism and societal order that it prioritizes — prompt us to ask: can we come up with different ways of having, that honor relationships of life outside of the market — ones that formal jural relations and property law don’t fully recognize?

This is a difficult challenge because the capitalist economy, expressing a certain configuration of social relationships (competition, exclusivity, etc.), has its own propulsive logic and power that commodifies nature, labor, and money. Property law aggressively tracks and reinforces this very logic, creating a self-reinforcing, self-enclosed cycle. Law both reflects and fortifies the political and economic order. It’s a vicious cycle that must somehow be broken and overcome.

Collective Property as a Counterpoint to 
Individual Property?

Could collective property serve as a vehicle for recognizing a larger set of relations? That is certainly what a broad spectrum of political progressives have sought to do through cooperatives, land trusts, public trusts, foundations, nonprofit organizations, and other legal forms. Within the market/state system and property law, this approach certainly has a logical appeal. It is a way that groups of people try to serve collective social needs over private business interests. This approach has fed the belief that collective property is quite different from individual property. But in truth, they are more alike than different. Individual property means that there is one owner.20 Collective property has two or more owners, or even thousands of co-owners. But in either case, the character of property rights (the ability to exclude, transfer, etc.) is much the same. The chief difference is in the number of owners, not in the nature of the property rights.

What we are suggesting is that collective property is only modestly different from personal property. There is no difference in principle between the two. It helps to realize that the etymology of the word “private” traces back to the Latin word privare, meaning “to deprive.” Individual and collective property rights both authorize the right to deprive, or exclude others from use of the property. But beware of binary thinking: when we point to the commonality between individual and collective property, we are not naively suggesting that all property should instead be open to anybody at any moment, without limitation.

We are suggesting a reconceptualization — that it is possible to reimagine property in ways that limit use, honor social relations, and prevent domination. These are, of course, some essential features of commons. Finding ways to rethink property could help us support commons and reverse engineer the totalizing dynamics of capital. We will return to this topic in Chapter Eight, but for now let’s have a closer look at the supposed differences between private and collective property.

There are significant differences between the ways in which property rights are exercised by one owner as opposed to several owners. Collective property requires at least a common agreement among all co-owners, which itself can be quite complicated. And some forms of collective property such as co-ops, trusts, and nonprofits avoid the structural imperative to maximize profits, in the ways that corporations and businesses must. So some forms of collective property can achieve a great deal of social good despite using legal forms philosophically rooted in an individualist mindset.

Ultimately, however, the potential of collective property as a legal form has limits. It still divides the world into “mine” and “yours” or even “for our group alone” (a “club good,” in economic terms). As a result, even collective property can be bought out by those with more money or sold out by co-owners abandoning their mutual commitments. The owners of a co-op, for example, upon seeing an appreciation in the market value of their assets, may decide to cash out. Or its leaders may decide to turn away from a mission of mutual support and become a market competitor that functions as a quasi-corporation. Or the trustees of a foundation or trust may decide unilaterally to liquidate the entity without regard for the designated beneficiaries.

If we wish to imagine a post-capitalist order that gets beyond the built-in presuppositions of property law and the host culture of capitalism, we will have to look elsewhere. We see two general approaches: a Pre-Property Regime that allows anyone to access and use resources without restriction; and Relational Ways of Having that recognize and support commoning. A Pre-Property Regime is in effect an open access regime or free-for-all. This approach is attractive for the use of knowledge, ideas, and digital code because it establishes open platforms and open exchange, escaping direct proprietary control. However, in the case of finite resources like land, a Pre-Property Regime amounts to a free-for-all that can result in overexploitation.

The following table illustrates the differences between personal property and collective property, and how they differ from a Pre-Property Regime.

The differences between personal property and collective property are gradual. However, there is a qualitative difference between private property regimes (personal/corporate/collective) and a No-Property regime.
Source: Authors’ elaboration on G.G. Stevenson’s classifications in Common Property Economics: A General Theory and Land Use Applications (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 58.

Relational Ways of Having is a way of using things that lets participants flexibly decide among themselves how shared wealth and social relations shall be managed. This regime moves beyond the presuppositions of conventional property law and its market norms. No single party or faction has absolute legal control over the wealth, and certainly no one has authority to sell it. It is protected from both internal capture and external alienation. This also means that the resource is protected from what we call Governing-through-Money, the capitalist practice of allowing those with greater money to out-govern and control others. This flaw is baked into property law. By presuming that value=money and that therefore more wealth=greater value, the principle of “money rules” is inescapable. It is not only a problem for commoners, but for capitalist enterprises forced to dance to the tune called by the owners of finance capital.

Relational Ways of Having help us realize that there are many ways to steward and deepen the multiple relationships affected by property. This conceptualization helps us see how individual use rights and collective property regimes are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they need each other! Individual use rights are a key condition for a flourishing collective property regime. Individuals must always have spheres of personal discretion and privacy. To better understand how use rights and collective property can coexist, we need to see the distinction between Possession and Property.

Possession is Distinct From Property

In both common law and civil law systems, possession is what happens when you personally have control over something by (sometimes literally) “sitting on it.” The Latin word sedere, from which the word “possession” derives, means “to sit.” Think about the flat you’ve rented. From a property law point of view, you may possess it as a tenant, but you don’t own it. You cannot give it away, bequeath it to your children, transfer or sell it, or, in legal terms, “alienate” it. You can sell only what you own, not what you possess.

Privileging ownership over possession has far-reaching consequences. It means that the state, in alliance with corporations and investors, becomes the champion of owners. It installs a hierarchy of subordination and capitalist social roles. This can be vividly seen in the history of states sweeping aside Indigenous rights and traditional use rights, installing in their place modern, liberal property rights and the market system.

In the late 1880s, for example, the US Government sought to eradicate Native American commoning of land by imposing a system of private ownership. The Dawes Severalty Act, which mandated this radical cultural dispossession, granted US citizenship only to those Native Americans who took up “residence separate and apart from any tribe” —
i.e., to those who gave up their tribal identities and became private property holders. The prime author of the Dawes Severalty Act, Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, explained that under common ownership “there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.”21

On countless other occasions, European and American imperialists have repeated this pattern. They have forced Indigenous cultures to surrender their stewardship of inalienable common lands and treat their land as “private property” and tribal members as individuals. Historian E.P. Thompson described how this model was imposed on Indigenous peoples in North America, India, and the South Pacific: “Property in land required a landowner, improving the land required labor, and therefore subduing the earth required also subduing the laboring poor.” Thompson cites a Lord Goderich, who explained in 1831: “Without some division of labor, without a class of persons willing to work for wages, how can society be prevented from falling into a state of almost primitive rudeness, and how are the comforts and refinements of civilized life to be procured?”22

Once again, ownership implies a different social order and set of relationships to the earth than possession. The two are similar in that both provide clear rights of access and use, and neither is “open to all and shareable without restriction.” If you own a flat, you are entitled to sell it or give the key to the person who rents it. If you only possess a flat (because you rented it), you can still determine access rights (you have the key) but are not entitled to sell it.

As this difference suggests, possession is focused on concrete use and use value (which are critical to commoning) while property ownership is oriented toward exchange value. Custom, vernacular practices, ethical norms, sacred places, and historical things are generally subordinated to the rights of owners.23 However, custom, or what we call Vernacular Law, has its own underestimated powers. It commands the respect of large numbers of people, and therefore has a moral authority and political power that the guardians of property law may be reluctant to acknowledge or confront. Vernacular Law also can provide participatory, localized solutions for problems that stymie bureaucracies and markets. We now turn to Vernacular Law as a potential counterforce to the overreaching claims of property rights.

Custom as Vernacular Law

In traditional commons, use rights were not enforced through formal, written law, but through social memory and lively traditions. Community life featured “an annual procession around the boundaries of the village and the lands belonging to it, and a communal drink after auditing the common box (the community funds),” as one property historian writes.

Folk customs were combined with the common pasture. To the peasants, the bell that the village bull wore around his neck on the pasture signaled, ‘the reeve is coming, the reeve is coming!’ (The reeve kept the community’s breeding bull.) On New Year’s Day, the herdsmen blew their horns, went from door to door and sang their song, asking the peasants to give them something — such as their best-smoked sausages. The gifts were considered an expression of the peasants’ esteem for the community employees’ careful handling of their livestock.”24

In all cultures, largely outside the gaze of state law and monarchies, another legal tradition has successfully managed resources on its own terms. It is not driven by the formal logic of state jurisprudence, and some might not even regard it as law because it is unwritten. But certainly the everyday practices, rituals, and ethical norms of ordinary people function as a powerful form of law. Custom is one way that people have sustainably managed themselves and their care-wealth without the centralized, top-down apparatus of state power.

Examples are plentiful. Throughout the world, fishing communities stage rituals to express thanks for the return of the fish. Harvest festivals celebrate and enact the proper ways to bring in the crop. The subak rice farmers of Indonesia have developed elaborate religious rites to coordinate when to irrigate and harvest. Forest commoners agree on ways to monitor for poachers and theft. The scholars associated with the International Association for the Study of Commons have produced hundreds of case studies about similar commons.

Sometimes the state chooses to recognize custom for its own administrative convenience, in effect ratifying customary practices as a matter of law. This can be seen in the ejidos of Spain and Mexico, the acequias for water irrigation in New Mexico, the obştea of common land and forests in Romania,25 the iriaiken for harvesting mushrooms and other natural resources in Japan, and their equivalent in Switzerland, the OberAllmeindkorporation.26 All of these customary commons have existed longer than any state or nation-state in history. The Allmeindkorporationen actually date back to 1114!

Although these forms of peer governance are variously referred to as informal, Indigenous, common, or local, we prefer to use the more general term Vernacular Law. We are inspired by social critic Ivan Illich, who used the term “vernacular” to refer to the living, social character of this mode of law. Vernacular Law thrives in “places and spaces where people are struggling to achieve regeneration and social restoration against the forces of economic globalization,” as one commentator put it.27 Custom as a form of law commands our attention because it can be an effective way for ordinary people to apply their moral sensibilities and practical wisdom to the management of their property, independent of the moral and political logic of the market/state. Precisely because custom defies Lockean notions of property (fixed, based on individual rights, market-oriented), it honors a richer set of relationships among people and the environment. By giving people a way to communicate their existential and affective relationships with rivers, forests, pastures, wild game, and fisheries that sustain them, custom expresses what is meaningful to people. Culture molds itself around natural rhythms. Custom thus can represent a more benign, relationship-based way of having than those sanctioned by modern property law and markets. People’s cherished, tried-and-true practices can be given due respect as a legitimate force in law and governance. Custom can ripen into a functional form of law, and the state may see the wisdom of validating it. The tradition of common law jurisprudence has done this for centuries (while generally subordinating custom to property rights). American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. made the classic defense of customary practice in his famous 1881 essay “The Common Law”: “The first requirement of a sound body of law is that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.”28

Vernacular Law is valuable because it emerges from the community itself, and can evolve and mutate as new conditions arise. It reflects the sentiments of ordinary people, not the priorities of their elected representatives, political elites, or jurisprudential thought. As Holmes put it: “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”29

The modern world often denigrates custom as backward, superstitious, or inefficient. It sees bureaucratic systems — which purport to be based on scientific rationality, fair and uniform rules, and central administration — as the superior way to manage things. But custom, which mixes celebration and conviviality with the serious work of stewarding a living environment, has its own efficacy and moral authority. The annual beating of the bounds — the village procession around the perimeter of a commons described in the Introduction to Part III — was both a festive event with cakes and beer and a serious assertion of commoners’ entitlements.

Custom can be needlessly inflexible, to be sure, but it generally distills the wisdom of years or even generations of everyday experience in a particular landscape. It reflects a rich legacy of experimentation about what works, what doesn’t, and how people can achieve successful, long-term outcomes. In evolutionary terms, one might say that customs are adaptive because they take account of a multitude of subtle, dynamic relationships. That’s another reason why custom can be effective: it embodies people’s situated knowledge, ethical convictions, and emotional bonds to their land, forests, rivers, and mountains.30

Property law professor Carol Rose calls custom “a medium through which a seemingly ‘unorganized’ public may organize itself and act, and in a sense even ‘speak’ with the force of law.”31 This, indeed, is one reason why the state is often wary of custom: it embodies a moral authority and power that the state powers may regard as a threat. An American court in 1860 rejected the claims of traditional rights, saying that they are “forms of community unknown in this state.”32 Courts have generally declined to recognize custom as compelling because “if a community were going to make claims in a corporate capacity, then the residents would have to organize themselves in a way legally authorized by the state,” explains Rose.33 Despite the desire of politicians and state ministries to supersede and marginalize custom, an estimated half of the world’s arable land is managed collectively by some 2.5 billion people, according to Land Rights Now.34 A significant percentage of these people clearly look to custom as a force in Peer Governance.

Custom as a vehicle of moral authority and practical wisdom poses something of a conundrum for state power: how can it grant formal recognition and legitimacy to social practices that are so deeply informal? Yet the question can also be reversed: can state law enjoy legitimacy and support — and deliver effective results — without recognizing custom? Elinor Ostrom speaks to these concerns with her seventh and eighth design principles — that commoners must have the right of self-organization and that commons must be nested in multiple layers of governmental systems.35

Inalienability: A Crucial Concept for Commoning

While the social practices of Vernacular Law challenge the totalizing logic of property, history has shown the value of a legal doctrine to do the same. The concept of inalienability had its origins in Roman law, and is described in the original Latin texts as “things, the alienation of which is prohibited” and “things with which there is no trade.” The basic idea of inalienability is a prohibition of market exchange. What is inalienable cannot be bought and sold on the market. An inalienable thing cannot be inherited, mortgaged, seized, indemnified, or taxed.

Today, of course, almost everything is subject to almost unrestricted property rights. Virtually everything can be owned. The modern mind has seen fit to make property out of genes, words, smells, and snippets of sound. When combined with the sacrosanct “freedom of contract,” property rights facilitate the constant trading of nearly everything as a way to generate greater (monetized, private) wealth. The market/state enthusiastically encourages this dynamic because it promotes economic growth and tax revenues. In the process, however, trading relationships have an anti-social dimension: they constantly reenact the line between you and me and dissolve the bonds that connect the members of a society.

Surely one reason that inalienability has been such a hardy idea is that it originates as a social and ethical judgment — that it is wrong for some things to be appropriated. People would consider it a violation of community ethics or feelings of the sacred and profound if, for example, someone were to spray paint hateful graffiti in the town square or if religious shrines were used for commercial purposes. Most societies today regard the sale of babies, body organs, sex, legal rights, and votes as morally repugnant. There is a sufficiently strong social consensus that these things have such profound significance that the moral identity of the community itself would be compromised if they could be legally sold. Inappropriability is always a social judgment first, which legal systems later elevate into a legal prohibition. Roman law was endorsing the judgment that ancient places, theaters, roads, rivers, water conduits, and so on, should not be appropriable and tradable in the same way that bread and butter were.

It’s worth pondering the implications of this idea for our time. What if society were to regard certain artifacts as inalienable to anybody in general? What if our property rights did not entail absolute dominion, which includes the right to sell, but were instead limited? What if we recognize that the power of the commons also depends on the fact that, as French legal scholars Dardot and Laval put it, “Commons define a norm of inappropriability.”36

If this were the default legal position for certain realms of life, it would help reverse the damage associated with the alienation of so many things as tradeable property. As economic historian Karl Polanyi documented, the fledgling capitalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries forcibly redefined land, money, and labor as tradeable commodities.37 Polanyi called them “fictitious commodities” because none of them is actually produced for sale. Land is actually a gift of nature that teems with living creatures. Labor is human life itself. Money is merely a token of purchasing power — a means of trade — and not the object of trade, money itself as a commodity. Converting land, labor, and money into tradeable property was a precondition for creating market society.

It is therefore worth emphasizing: possession is not the problem. Tradeability, enacted through property rights, is. So what if we were to reconsider our treatment of land, labor, and money — and, we would add, knowledge — as commodities that can be owned? What if we began to treat them as something that should not be appropriated in the first place or be alienated for market use? What if we were to declare that digital code and knowledge, for example, could not be appropriated for individual use exclusively, but must be available to many individuals, separately and together, at the same time?

Creating protected spheres of inalienability in contemporary life may seem utopian. After all, modern society idolizes ownership. But it is neither far-fetched nor impractical to create zones of inalienability. When Dr. Jonas Salk, a co-creator of the polio vaccine, was asked in 1955 who owned the patent, he famously replied: “Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”38 Salk found it morally repugnant that a life-saving vaccine might be used as a source of private profits and become unaffordable to people who needed it. He therefore entrusted the polio vaccine to the World Health Organization to help assure that its benefits would be made widely available. A different cultural ethic has taken root in subsequent decades, of course, as nation-states grant patents to all sorts of essential medicines, mathematical algorithms, business methods, and knowledge that should be available to everyone.

In New Zealand, an inalienability rule is used to protect the trout population in Lake Taupo. The fishery regulations not only declare a cap on how many fish can be taken — a daily bag limit of six trout — but also a rule making it “illegal to sell or purchase trout.”39 So even though Lake Taupo is full of trout, you can’t eat any of them in local restaurants unless you fish them yourself, as allowed under the “daily bag catch.” You can bring your fish to the restaurant and they will prepare it for you — just as some restaurants in the US without a liquor license allow you to bring your own bottle of wine.

Rediscovering the Power of Res Nullius

Any project to reinvigorate the idea of inalienability would do well to study the history of an important doctrine of Roman law, res nullius. It is revealing that contemporary scholarship has all but forgotten this legal category and its judgments about shared culture. How did this happen? And could something similar to res nullius serve today as an effective legal element for responsible stewardship?

Res nullius had its roots in the early sixth century, when Emperor Justinian ordered a systematic synthesis of all existing imperial laws drawing upon the most important works in jurisprudence. The result, the Justinian Code — or, more formally, Corpus Iuris Civilis which means “Body of Civil Law” — issued between 534 and 528 B.C.E., greatly influenced modern law. The Code partitioned into separate classes the great mass of things that could be subject to property ownership, with different access and use rights for each class of property. (See table below.) Today, while we assume that property ownership falls into two basic categories, public and private, the ancient Romans remind us that there are more. They had a legal classification for personal property rights — res privatae. The state acted as a protector and trustee of res publicae — lands, civil buildings, and infrastructures — and recognized common property regimes, the so-called res communis, for air and water.40 It also declared that certain things known as res nullius cannot be owned.

Table based on definitions in the Institutes of Justinian.

A question that ought to concern we moderns is why the idea of unownability has virtually disappeared over the centuries. This is hard to say with any certainty, and diving into details and differing interpretations is beyond the scope of this book. But history tells us that when scholars were creating the new Justinian Code, they reinterpreted the original Latin terms used by prior legal scholars.

We can get an idea of how that happened by looking at one legal source, a text by Gaius, the celebrated Roman jurist of the second century. Gaius recognized five categories of property — the sacred, religious, and holy, (yes, three distinct realms!) as well as public and private — which the Justinian Code collapsed into four (see chart above). Why and how exactly this was done is hard to say with any certainty, but the point that is important to us is that new legal categories were invented, and old ones reinterpreted, as the Justinian Code was devised. and the very premises of law were reinvented. In that process, some pivotal shifts in the idea of ownability occurred, especially in distinctions that property law had previously made between things governed by divine law (ius divinum) and human-made law (ius humanum).41 While the latter body of law is clearly based on a social agreement, divine law (also sacred law) refers to any law that was believed to have come directly from the will of the gods (or in other societies, God or the Creator). And what was sacred, part of divine law, could not be appropriated and sold.

But to make matters more confusing, some pre-Justinian legal sources referred to so-called patrimonial things, such as objects of cultural heritage, that could not be sold. These were the opposite of extrapatrimonial things that could become commercial objects. The core of the matter is that things that belonged to the patrimonial sphere, or to divine law (depending on the text you look at), were considered inalienable by definition, and thus illegal to sell.

When the legal scholars assembled the Code of Justinian from such very diverse sources, they had to grapple with two sets of basic classification that existed in parallel — ius divinum/ius humanum in some sources, and patrimonial/extrapatrimonial in others. This obviously posed a problem. The classifications were not only overlapping, they were incompatible with each other. If the scholars were going to construct a single coherent restatement of law, they would either have to abandon one basic set of legal categories or generate a new classification system entirely. It’s as if designers were trying to meld the design logic of one interlocking, modular set of blocks — say, Lego — with a different set such as Playmobil. Within either system, everything fits together perfectly, but the two systems do not work together. This partly explains why the idea of unownability sank into oblivion: the framers of the new code of law could not accommodate the idea of sacredness, which had been attached to the idea of inalienability. The latter therefore lost its previous standing in law.

The process for synthesizing the new Justinian Code took another turn that affects us today. The ancient Romans, smart as they were, had wrapped the idea of inalienability in a “double cover” of protection. Legal historian Yan Thomas calls it a “double modus of being public and sacred,” by which he meant that inalienability pointed to the sacred character of public things. In other words, the Roman concept of “public” reflected a veneration for eternity and the sacred while also signifying something usable by all and publicly controlled in perpetuity.

Over the centuries, this latter idea of the patrimonial has been more explicitly preserved in law than the idea of “the sacredness of the public.” In fact, the idea of the patrimonial was given fresh life in 1982 when the Law of the Sea Convention (also known as UNCLOS III) was ratified. It declared that resources in waters beyond national jurisdiction, such as deep sea minerals, would be regarded as the “Common Heritage of Mankind.” However, it would be a mistake to presume that things considered part of the Common Heritage of Mankind are treated as inalienable and protected. Nation-states make conflicting claims to common heritage resources, and in fact, most negotiations revolve around how they should be exploited, by whom, and how profits will be distributed. Inalienability and protection of our heritage are not salient parts of the conversation.