David Bollier

Boosting economic growth is such a central element of modern political culture that few people truly consider whether it is ecologically sustainable.  It's not, as the twin specters of Peak Oil and climate change are demonstrating.  We desperately need some serious thinking about how to move from the “growth paradigm” as the default goal of our economy to an economy that structurally requires less energy and material throughput.  One term that has come to describe this vision is “degrowth.”  In fact, a major international conference on “Degrowth, Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity” will be held in Venice, Italy, on September 19-23. 

As part of that ongoing conversation, Austrians Andreas Exner and Christian Lauk recently published a thoughtful essay in Solutions magazine on “Social Innovations for Economic Degrowth.”  The piece focuses on how the Solidarity Economy and the global information commons offer a template for moving to a no-growth economy -- that is, an economy that uses less energy and material while increasing personal leisure and well-being. 

Exner and Lauk consider the models pioneered by the Solidarity Economy in Brazil in the late 1990s when that country “was hit by an economic crisis caused by the liberalization of capital markets.”  As bankruptcies and unemployment rose, poor people joined together with trade unions, universities and others to create cooperatives and other enterprises to meet people’s needs.  But the innovations were not just business models but social habits and practices that let people work together to meet basic needs without the relentless imperative to grow and chew up the natural environment.

One of the great achievements of the late Professor Elinor Ostrom was the identification of key design principles for successful commons.  She set forth eight of them in her landmark 1990 book, Governing the Commons.  The wording of those principles is aimed at social scientists who study the management of common-pool resources from a neutral, non-participatory, scientific perspective.  As a result, the principles are not as accessible to the general public, nor do they reflect the direct experiences and first-person voice of commoners.    

The first German Sommerschool on the Commons, which took place in Bechstedt/Thuringia in June 2012, decided to remedy this problem.  Participants took part in intense debates over what a new set of principles for commoning – based on the Ostrom principles – might look like if they reflected the personal perspective of commoners themselves.  The result is a statement, "Eight Points of Reference for Commoning,” which can be seen as a re-interpretation – remix? – of Ostrom's design principles.  

As Silke Helfrich notes on her Commonsblog, the Eight Points of Reference for Commoning “are based on the belief, that commons can flourish in very different contexts.”  The German version can be found here.  An English translation is below.  The German commoners consider the current wording of both the German and English versions as relatively stable, but they invite comments and suggestions for further changes.

After a week at the beach, I'm back at my desk and tracking all things commons.  --DB 

A recent piece by social anthropologist Mariya Ivancheva of Central European University in Sofia reminds us that the political and culture context of the commons matters a great deal in how we think about it – much more than we might imagine.  Her piece appeared at OpenDemocracy and was excerpted by Michel Bauwens at the P2P Foundation blog.

Ivancheva notes how the commons is experiencing a big surge in western Europe, especially in Italy, but she stresses that the history of Bulgaria is quite different from that of western Europe.  Western European commoners have fought the privatization of public resources such as water (Italy), cultural works (the ACTA treaty) and housing (Spain and France).  While eastern Europeans have also protested various acts of privatization, many of them favor the commons in some respects while viewing private property and (capitalist) economic development more favorably.  She writes: 

For the majority of people who grew up imbued with neoliberal ideology nurtured by anti-communist and anti-communal narratives – hegemonic public discourse in east-central Europe since 1989 – the idea of “the commons” does not make much sense. Many prefer an opt-in and opt-out strategy: they stand against the privatization of nature and for the privatization of industry and services; against the pollution of water and soil, but for the private property and “management” thereof; against the cutting of funds in the education sector, but for “efficiency” and individual survival by competition within the educational and job sector.

At the same time, the debates in the public forums surrounding the anti-Forestry Act protests [opposing ski-tourism facilities on public land] made clear the elite-driven public they attracted. The discourse is centered on preserving individual liberty and urges people to choose their struggles selectively (even when undergoing urgent political developments). This became even more problematic once you added in the manifest feeling of entitlement that people with upper social and significant geographical mobility demonstrated. As the author of one manifesto that became famous among protesters claimed, “We are against the limitation of the possibilities of development.”

Noam Chomsky recent gave a meaty talk, “Destroying the Commons:  On Shredding the Magna Carta” that shows how fragile the rights of commoners truly are. Achieved after enormous civil strife, the Magna Carta supposedly guaranteed commoners certain civic and procedural rights.  A companion document, the Charter of the Forest later incorporated into the Magna Carta, expressly guarantees commoners stipulated rights to access and use forests, land, water, game and other natural resources for their subsistence. 

Both documents are now being shredded today with barely a peep of acknowledgment that centuries-old principles of human rights are being swept aside.  Much of Chomsky’s talk is dedicated to his familiar critiques of US geopolitics and corporate globalization.  But he has a few illuminating passages about the Charter of the Forest and modern-day enclosures, especially in the global South.  Chomsky gave the speech at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. 

Citing Linebaugh’s book, The Magna Carta Manifesto, Chomsky writes:

The Charter of the Forest imposed limits to privatization…. By the seventeenth century, however, this Charter had fallen victim to the rise of the commodity economy and capitalist practice and morality.  

With the commons no longer protected for cooperative nurturing and use, the rights of the common people were restricted to what could not be privatized, a category that continues to shrink to virtual invisibility.  In Bolivia, the attempt to privatize water was, in the end, beaten back by an uprising that brought the indigenous majority to power for the first time in history.  The World Bank has just ruled that the mining multinational Pacific Rim can proceed with a case against El Salvador for trying to preserve lands and communities from highly destructive gold mining.  Environmental constraints threaten to deprive the company of future profits, a crime that can be punished under the rules of the investor-rights regime mislabeled as “free trade.” And this is only a tiny sample of struggles underway over much of the world….