Today we are facing a deep climate crisis, a global pandemic and the potential collapse of an economy powered by artificially created needs and infinite growth, systemic racism and inequality . These are all a result of a broken system that has failed both people and planet. The power is in the hands of the few who are destroying the environment, our democracy, increasing inequality and creating conflicts.

COVID is an opportunity to rethink how we produce, consume, work, communicate, move around, and eat and therefore, to revive the Commons. The Commons is more of a social system for managing shared wealth. It is more accurate to talk about the commons as a process, a whole — the synergy between the community, the shared resource and the rules for its management.

Right now, many of the most effective people-led solutions are based on the logic of the commons: from open source masks and ventilators, to campaigns for open sourcing the vaccine, mutual aid networks, provision packages and tech handbooks. A pivot in political thinking is also apparent, presenting new opportunities for social and environmental alternatives to business as usual. Commoning is historically persistent and prevalent around the world, particularly in Indigenous cultures and the Global South. In practice, it involves negotiating, collaborating and communicating for shared purposes and collective benefit. An estimated 2.5 billion people depend on some form of natural resource commons for their sustenance, yet many of these remain unprotected and vulnerable to capture or enclosure.

While people may feel un-empowered and lack the agency to steer our economic ship from the passenger deck themselves, with an unconditional commitment to one another, we can work together to both develop and support positive examples that bring the Commons to life, while demanding that governments enable the Commons to function as part of our economic system. We need to champion this inclusive vision for humanity—one that is based on democratic governance, solidarity and cooperation.

Advancing the Commons will help build resilience against future crises, which hopefully will pave the way to a green, just and inclusive transition to a system that operates within its ecological limits.

In order to contribute to building RESILIENCE for future crises while shaping a green, just and inclusive TRANSITION to a system operating within its ecological limits, here are some ideas GP could integrate in our work:

Promoting Commons based bottom up self-empowered alternatives:

• • Design global, manufacture local (DGML) distributed manufacturing
    Systems of production which are localized, yet globally connected,that can rapidly respond to urgent needs without depending on massive global chains. These models can create community-level sharing economies truly locally based and economies of scope vs economies of scale. Planned obsolescence disappears.

  • Creative commons that work to promote and facilitate open access i.e policies that require publicly funded research to be made available under an open license or dedicated to the public domain (COVID19 data and research) with all educational resources openly licensed to facilitate dissemination of reliable, practical information to the public.

  • Distributed Cooperative Organisations (DisCOs)
    DisCOs are an approach where people work together to create value in ways that are cooperative, commons-oriented and rooted in feminist economics. Platform and Open Cooperatives fit in here as they promote the cooperative as a way for the Commons to interact with the market, where those who create the value also own it and thus, prompt the distribution of wealth. DisCOs are amplified by the power of Distributed Ledger/Blockchain technologies, harnessing the utility of tech without being completely tech-centric, emphasizing mutual trust and remembering to have fun.

  • Promote and participate in P2P politics
    An alternative vision of living is based on civic participation, affiliation, universalism and shared experiences, such as the city of the commons and municipalist coalitions that are oriented around the idea of the Commons that enhance participatory and democratic processes e.g European Commons Assembly (a pan-European network of commoners engaged in political action), or the Citizens assemblies on Climate and Ecological Justice in Ireland and in progress in the UK. Binding, representative and transparent Citizens Assemblies that are supported by experts are one of the core demands of the Extinction Rebellion movement.

Creating more Commons

• • Secure common ownership of land - Farm Land Trusts /Covenant as Commons
    To feed everyone, we must not only preserve the soil fertility but also the ability of those who farm to do so in an ecological way and to become more resilient during crises like the COVID 19 pandemic. Soil fertility and good farming land should be one of humanity’s commons as it is the necessary condition to feed ourselves.

Making the Commons more visible, more tangible

• • through live experiences that showcase how the commons work in practice i.e negotiating, collaborating and communicating for shared purposes and collective benefit and through stories of solidarity and cooperation.

A fairer economic framework is operating according to Commons principles, with a different vision of how we perceive the human being and how we meet our needs. Society is more resilient, just and green, with an alternative political economy based on abundance, not scarcity and greed. Systems of production are localized yet globally connected so that they can rapidly respond to urgent needs without depending on massive global chains. The workforce is organised into restorative and purpose-oriented clusters of people who take care of each other. The new economy has a new politics and a more emancipated relation to the state.

Commoning is inspiring people to reclaim our common wealth so that power is distributed through networks and Peer to Peer (People to People) models. The people and communities adopt business models where those who create value also share it in a distributed manner, eg. cooperatives. The essential and basic values of the Commons, rediscovered in a time of crisis, have enhanced global solidarity that has a strong basis in the new systems of bottom-up, place-based provisioning (*1) and care, that are peer-governed, fair, inclusive, and participatory. The system is driven by collaboration and cooperation for the construction of social and environmental value.

Case Studies

Design Global Manufacture local

• • Wikihouse, a foundation which supports people to design and build sustainable housing.

  • Farm Hack -Farm Hack is a community of farmers that build and modify their own machinery. The central node is its digital platform, where the productive community shares designs, know-how and ideas. Currently the platform features more than 500 pieces of machinery and the community has members from all over the world.

  • POC21 is an international innovation community. They work on open source manufacturing projects to create a proof of concept for a truly sustainable society. Faced with the paucity of establishment-led solutions to climate change and resource scarcity, the organizers of P0C21 decided to fill the void by creating practical solutions toward a low-carbon, low-resource economy.

  • Enspiral is a network of professionals and companies that are “working on stuff that matters”, i.e. socially oriented projects. It encompasses a broad community of diverse professionals (productive community), including developers, legal and financial experts. They pool their skills and creative energy to create a commons of knowledge and software. Around these commons a web of business ventures (entrepreneurial coalition) offers open source tools and services that enable creative communities like their own to address certain challenges related to democratic governance and the digital age.

Creative commons

• • Wikipedia is an online free-content encyclopedia project helping to create a world in which everyone can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Since its creation on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has grown into the world's largest reference website, attracting 1.7 billion unique visitors monthly as of November 2020.

  • Creative Commons Open GLAM Platform Activities Fund: Enhancing public domains in Indonesia: Catalogue and Re-Make Project. This project wants to show the value of the public domain in Indonesia. For that, they will be creating an open-access catalogue of public domain works from Indonesia, and inviting a visual artist from Indonesia to create a remix using some of the public domain works currently available online. These activities will be presented in a webinar series, where the members of CC Indonesia will explain some of the core concepts of the public domain and how it works, the function of their open-access catalogue, and invite the visual artist to talk about the remix of the public domain works resulting from this project.

Peer 2 Peer Politics

• • The city of Ghent, Belgium boasts no fewer than 500 commons-related projects, a ten-fold increase seen over the past ten years.

  • The Bologna Regulation is based on a change in the Italian constitution allowing engaged citizens to claim urban resources as commons, and to declare an interest in their care and management. After an evaluation procedure, an “accord” is signed with the city specifying how the city will support the initiative with an appropriate mix of resources and specifying a joint “public-commons” management. In Bologna itself, dozens of projects have been carried out, and more than 140 other Italian cities have followed suit. This regulation is radical in giving citizens direct power to emit policy proposals and transform the city and its infrastructure, as an enabler for this. The key is the reversal of logic: the citizenry initiates and proposes, the city enables and supports.

  • The European Commons Assembly

Distributed Cooperative Organisations (DisCOs)

• • Co-ops Show Resilience as the Pandemic Goes On: there are co-ops working together to support one another through the Covid crisis, with examples from partners in Mexico, Paraguay and Peru which demonstrate the power of this structure, especially in rural areas lacking support. These fair trade cooperatives embody Cooperative Principle number seven, Concern for community, and show they are more than just businesses and that relationships are a strong foundation for resilience.

  • Mutual Aid Networks are location-specific and solidarity based Meta Economic Networks. Coalesced around nested cooperative structures, a Mutual Aid Network (or “MAN”) pools capacity building, stewards community value, and rewards socially and environmentally useful work. Some of the tools used to achieve this include timebanking, b2b mutual credit, cooperative lending, saving and investment models, community spaces and shared manufacturing facilities. In South Africa, communities in Johannesburg have made survival packs for people in informal settlements: hand sanitiser, toilet paper, bottled water and food. In Cape Town, a local group has GIS mapped all the district’s households, surveyed the occupants, and assembled local people with medical expertise, ready to step in if the hospitals are overwhelmed. Another community in the city has built washstands in the train station and is working to turn a pottery studio into a factory making sanitiser.

  • Good neighbour programme: Venezuelans come together to provide food for the elderly of Caracas in response to the Covid crisis, by redistributing food no longer sold by restaurants to vulnerable elderly people. The program has been made possible thanks to the coordination between the dedicated work of its members, the joint cooperation of Venezuelan society and the use of technology such as social media.

Food Commons

• • Farm Land Trust /Covenant as Commons: Gent en Garde and Urban Agriculture Program — Food commons. Two examples of Ghent’s focus on developing political support and citizen involvement for fair, organic, local food. Another food related project is Lunch met LEF, which is reversing the dependence on cheap food shipped long-distance from multinationals by providing fresh, local foods to school lunch programs, shipped by local cargo bike shares.

  • Food security: Urban Family Gardens grows local food security in Colombia. The “Huertas Familiares para Autoconsumo” (Urban Family Gardens) initiative enables families, often displaced from rural areas, to achieve a certain level of self-sufficiency in healthy, fresh and nutritious food by granting them access to both the training and land necessary to grow their own vegetables for home consumption. With a peer-learning structure in mind, the knowledge and expertise of the participating families provides the training the group requires.

The Commons is “the glue” that connects the practices and values sitting at the centre of the Greenpeace framework: respecting planetary boundaries, challenging power structures, shifting mindsets.

Use this moment of disruption to:

SHIFT MINDSETS
Create a new normal, change cultural practices and promote values and norms that reward finding meaning, purpose and satisfaction by working together to enhance the lives of all.

FROM: Individualism
TO: Collective, interdependent community

FROM: My contribution to important decisions is irrelevant and won’t make a difference.
TO: My contribution is essential to the wellbeing of the community and the planet.

FROM: Commoning, or sharing resources, is not sustainable because people act in their own self interest that leads to depleting or spoiling the shared resource.
TO: Commoning, or sharing of resources is sustainable because the commoners are not only looking after their own interests, but also taking care that their own collective interaction with shared resources is sustainable.

SHIFT POWER

• Push the political and economic elite to move beyond the state/market dichotomy and enable the commons
  There needs to be a major shift, from governmental, corporate and private ownership, to common ownership facilitated and enabled by the state. Communities and the commons should not replace the role of the state, but they should complement it. The recognition of the Commons will enhance “social power allowing people to enjoy freedom without repressing others, enact fairness without bureaucratic control … and assert sovereignty without nationalism (*1).

• Empower peer to peer networks and community action to counterbalance political and economic elites
  Where governments are failing, we need to support communities to mobilise the migration of power away from private business, the market and the state, towards the commons. By promoting collective decision making and showing that this functions better, we can influence and change the current centralised, top-down system of governance.

Enabling the Commons means enabling people power. Its’ peer to peer, people to people networks are set up to spark the creation and distribution of value and to promote a P2P model characterised by contribution and open source. It also means building counterpower that debunks models where peer to peer dynamics have been combined with hierarchical growth and profit driven systems that have created monstrous hybrids of the so-called sharing economy, as shown by the examples of Uber, FB and AirBnB which promote consumerism, increase inequality and job insecurity in the gig economy.

SPARK STRUCTURAL CHANGE/ CREATE ENVIRONMENTAL BOUNDARIES

1. Push for structural change in relation to investments, policies and practices that supports a shift from a focus on individual interest, where we need to extract more to get richer, towards the needs of the community, where we put boundaries on the resources that we use.

2. Advocate for policies that enhance the Global Commons
   Goods that currently have unrestrained property rights, such as vaccines and medicines as well as renewables and comms technologies should become part of the global commons by abolishing the TRIPS Agreement (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights).

While the high seas and deep seabed are one of five Global Commons i.e. those parts of the Earth's surface beyond national jurisdictions, this is not preventing the destruction of marine ecosystems from extractive industries such as fishing. Additional protections are therefore needed to the need to restore and maintain ecosystem health by placing areas of land and ocean off-limits to industrial activity (with at least 30% by 2030 as a milestone towards protecting half of the Earth from industrial activity by 2050) to enable the protection and regeneration of ecosystems with maximum benefit for people, biodiversity and climate. Such areas should be considered as part of the Global Commons.

Soil fertility and good farming land should also be one of humanity’s commons as they are of prime importance for feeding ourselves. We need to promote opportunities and tools for those who farm to do so in an ecological way and to become more resilient during crises like the COVID 19 pandemic. Shared ownership in the form of Farm Land Trusts / Covenant as Commons is a good way to achieve this. This is also facilitated by mechanisms for science and technology transfer among the countries in the Global South. This is also relevant to other sectors such as fishing, forestry and energy.

3. Promote new business models that put practices of care, openness, reciprocity and responsible resource stewardship at the core and are driven by the power of community solutions to break the current patterns of destruction.