A global commons

Written on 7th May 2020

July 13–27 2020 is the week of the International Association for the Study of the Commons 2020 Virtual Conference on African Commons. The conference hopes to bring together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers on the governance of shared resources in Africa. Mainstream discussion of the commons is not widespread anywhere, but a quick internet search (admittedly in English) shows up that the online conversation about commoning in the global south is even less visible. However, this doesn’t mean that commoning doesn’t take place outside of Europe and North America, in fact, far from it; many communities around the world have commoning principles deeply embedded in their systems; often passed through generations. You might not know this, though, if you search for books on the commons online; when I did, every single one I could find in my initial search came from a European or North American author.

Photo by Reuben Hayfron on Unsplash

Recognising this as an issue, in 2012 David Bollier and Silke Helfrich edited ‘The Wealth of The Commons — A World Beyond Market & State’, a collection of 73 essays describing “the enormous potential of the commons in conceptualizing and building a better future”; 21 of the essays are authored by people outside of Europe and the USA. 2015 saw the release of Silke and David’s ‘Patterns of Commoning’, a collection of 50 essays, with a handful of authors writing from India, Colombia, Mexico, Bolivia, New Zealand, Venezuela and Ethiopia. The two collections are both incredibly important and wonderful to read, but Silke and David’s efforts to share and amplify stories of commoning from beyond the confines of the West stand out as an exception to the rule. Surely a movement that espouses the values of equity and sharing can do better?

In ‘Free, Fair and Alive’ David and Silke suggest some of the root causes of the ‘invisibility’ of commoning, they suggest “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.”

There might well also be an issue with language; not all communities practicing commoning will describe it as such. In his article “The Commons, the State and The Public: A Latin American Perspective’ Daniel Chavez writes “In Latin America and Spain, those of us interested in this [the commons] field of activism and research must overcome a linguistic obstacle, since the translation of the concept of the commons from English into Spanish is not always easy or appropriate. This problem also appears in other parts of the world, so we often use the original English word to avoid confusion.” However, if we (with full recognition that even this definition is without bias) take the Commons Transition Primer’s four basic elements of ‘the commons’ we would find billions of people around the world that share these principles, or a variation thereof. The four basic elements are (1) material or immaterial resources managed collectively and democratically; (2) social processes that foster and deepen cooperative relationships; (3) a new logic of production and a new set of productive processes; and (4) a paradigm shift, which conceives the commons as an advance beyond the classical market/state or public/private binary oppositions.

So, where does this knowledge exist, this knowledge of commoning outside of a very white, very Western, academic sphere? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that the Global South owes anyone else this knowledge, but I often see principles, systems and ideas that are suddenly ‘in vogue’ in the white, Western mainstream that have originated in the margins and do not get the credit (or the resources, coverage and support) that they deserve and the commons could be one such example. I also wonder what value there would be in cross-pollinating this knowledge, experience and wisdom amongst marginalised peoples, and in fact all peoples, but with the framing, leadership and narrative control of those who have been living this way for centuries; so this knowledge and these experiences, wherever they may be, are truly valuable. This is something that I will be exploring more deeply, and I would welcome knowing more about where this conversation lies, if at all, outside of the spaces of the ‘usual suspects’ (and that includes me — for full transparency, I’m white and British). If there is benefit to more marginalised ‘commoning’ communities having their voices and stories amplified, then it’s work that should be done. Please let us know if this is something we can support with.

Commoning around the world

FOSSFA

The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) is the premier African FOSS organisation, and was founded under the auspices of the Bamako Bureau of the African Information Society Initiative within the mandate given by African Governments in 1995 to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). The Vision of FOSSFA is to promote the use of FOSS and the FOSS model in African development, and the organization supports the integration of FOSS in national policies. FOSSFA also coordinates, promotes, and adds value to African FOSS initiatives, creativity, industry, expertise, efforts and activities at all levels.

Find out more here.

Take Back the App! Announcing a new podcast; ‘Frontiers of Commoning’

David Bollier has just announced the launch of a new podcast series, Frontiers of Commoning, which is a project of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. Every month he will host a lively conversation with creative pioneers who are demonstrating new ways of commoning.

Find out more here.

This week, we are mostly reading…

Here are some of our favourite books, articles and long read articles on the commons. Let us know what you think or send us your own recommendations.

The Tragic African Commons

A century of expropriation, suppression and subversion

by H.W.O. Okoth — Ogendo (Kenya)

When Garret Hardin published his much acclaimed article “The Tragedy of the Commons” some thirtytwo years ago, he may not have been aware that a tragedy of major proportions had, for half a century, indeed been unfolding in respect of the African Commons. Contrary to Hardin’s now discredited thesis, that tragedy had nothing to do with the intrinsic characteristics of the Commons. It was triggered by their expropriation and ruthless exploitation by colonial authorities; fueled by the contemptuous denial of their judicial content and compounded by systematic administrative, judicial and legislative subversion designed to foreclose any possibility of their renaissance!

Read more here.

Decolonising the Commons: Fugitivity and Future Planning in End Times

by Kenji Jalal Khozoeia

“A machine is eating the planet. Seated at the helm and in the furnace, humanity seems besieged, seized and sick, inflated with incomplete memories of conquest and contradiction. The machine ploughs the dirt and disturbs the life therein, creating an illusion of movement, distorting sound and light. In the torn earth that it claims and claims to see, the machine sees nothing but atoms of individual value, relating and exchanging with ever growing but never unmanageable complexity. The machine feeds on this process as it encloses it, staggering across the earth with a fitful urgency, every step heavy, absolute, lacerating.”

Read more here.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

by Walter Rodney (Guyana)

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, Rodney makes the unflinching case that African “mal-development” is not a natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from the continent, a practice that continues up into the present. Meticulously researched, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a relevant study for understanding the so-called “great divergence” between Africa and Europe, just as it remains a prescient resource for grasping the multiplication of global inequality today.

Find the book here.

Non European/North American essays from ‘The Wealth of The Commons — A World Beyond Market & State’ from 2011

(We’ll cover Patterns of Commoning (2015) at a later date!)

• The Global Land Grab: The New Enclosures, by Liz Alden Wily (New Zealand)
• Genetically Engineered Promises & Farming Realities, by P.V. Satheesh (India)
• Mining as a Threat to the Commons: The Case of South America, by César Padilla (Chile)
• Dam Building: Who’s “Backward” — Subsistence Cultures or Modern “Development”?, by Vinod Raina (India)
• Hope from the Margins, by Gustavo Esteva (Mexico)
• Using “Protected Natural Areas” to Appropriate the Commons, by Ana de Ita (Mexico)
• Intellectual Property Rights and Free Trade Agreements: A Never-Ending Story, by Beatriz Busaniche (Argentina)
• Learning from Minamata: Creating High-Level Well-Being in Local Communities in Japan, by Takayoshi Kusago (Japan)
• The Faxinal: A Brazilian Experience of the Commons and Its Relationship with the State, by Mayra Lafoz Bertussi (Brazil)
• Capable Leadership, Institutional Skills and Resource Abundance Behind Flourishing Coastal Marine Commons in Chile, by Gloria L. Gallardo Fernández & Eva Friman (Chile/Sweden)
• Community Based Forest and Livelihood Management in Nepal, by Shrikrishna Upadhyay (Nepal)
• Salt and Trade at the Pink Lake: Community Subsistence in Senegal, by Papa Sow & Elina Marmer (Senegal)
• The Code is the Seed of the Software, An Interview with Adriana Sánchez (Costa Rica)
• El Buen Vivir and the Commons, A Conversation between Gustavo Soto Santiesteban and Silke Helfrich (Bolivia/Germany)
• Peer-to-Peer Economy and New Civilization Centered Around the Sustenance of the Commons, by Michel Bauwens and Franco Iacomella (Argentina/Belgium/Thailand)
• P2P-Urbanism: Backed by Evidence, by Nikos A. Salingaros and Federico Mena-Quintero (USA/Mexico)
• Copyright and Fairy Tales, by Carolina Botero and Julio César Gaitán (Colombia)
• Public Administration Needs Free Software, by Federico Heinz (Argentina)
• The Common Heritage of Mankind: A Bold Doctrine Kept Within Strict Boundaries, by Prue Taylor (New Zealand)
• Constructing Commons in the Cultural Environment, by Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann and Katherine J. Strandburg (Russia/USA/Kenya)
• The Yasuní-ITT Initiative, or The Complex Construction of Utopia, by Alberto Acosta (Ecuador)