11/05) Welcome to Commonomics: How to Build Local Economies Strong Enough for Everyone

[논둑길맨발로]

lauraflanders - YouTube

www.youtube.com/user/lauraflanders‎

• 저장된 페이지
• 유사한 페이지

이 페이지 번역하기

GRITtv with Laura Flanders features intelligent, eclectic conversation with the world's leading thinkers and doers. Primarily available on http://grittv.org/

Watch Chatting With Chomsky | GRITtv with Laura Flanders Episodes | News & Politics Videos | Blip - Blip.tv

► 24:32► 24:32

blip.tv/grittv/chatting-with-chomsky-6121530‎

• 유사한 페이지

2012. 5. 2.

Laura Flanders talks with MIT professor and author Noam Chomsky, to discuss his latest publication, OCCUPY ...

Welcome to Commonomics: How to Build Local Economies Strong Enough for Everyone

Thursday, 10 October 2013 00:00 By Laura Flanders, Yes! Magazine | Report

(Photo: Dayna Bateman / Flickr)Chokwe Lumumba was an unlikely candidate for high office in Mississippi. But last June, the former Black Nationalist and one-time attorney to Tupac Shakur was elected Mayor of Jackson. He’s now in hot pursuit, not of big box stores or the next silver bullet solution to what ails the state’s capital city. He wants to create worker-owned cooperatives and small-scale green businesses and to invest in training and infrastructure. It’s the program of change he ran on in the election: local self-reliance.

Jackson’s population is 80 percent black, 18 percent white, and the rest largely immigrant, with heavy concentrations of Indians, Nigerians, and Brazilians.

“Without question, the ideas of economic democracy that we want to propose come from the Southern context,” says Kali Akuno, a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and a coordinator of special projects for the Lumumba administration.

That Lumumba won the election came as a surprise to some, but not to Akuno: “There exists an audience in the black community that is way more willing than others to experiment with distribution.”

Self-reliance “is in our history. It’s had to be,” he continues. “People know about Fannie Lou Hamer organizing black voters to fight segregation, but do they know she also helped to start cooperatives with retail distribution across Mississippi that are still around today?”

Far from Mississippi, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, indigenous entrepreneur Mark Tilsen has just begun the process of turning ownership of his local food products company over to his workers. Tilsen founded Native American Natural Foods with his partner Karlene Hunter in 2006. Five years later, they won a Social Innovation Award from the Social Venture Network. Today, they’re innovating again: joining a cohort of Native American leaders in a program to strengthen the local economy by democratizing wealth and ownership. The program has been developed by the Democracy Collaborative and the Northwest Area Foundation.

Tilsen and I talked via cellphone in August, as a hailstorm pelted down on the reservation. For many years, Pine Ridge has ranked as this nation's poorest place according to the U.S. Census. Eighty percent of the residents are unemployed; 49 percent live below the poverty line. In 2007, life expectancy was estimated at 48 for men and 52 for women. “Why co-ops?” I asked.

“The goal of our company is wealth creation and self-determination on the Pine Ridge Reservation, so we want our employees to own the wealth they’re creating. We didn’t make this company to sell or flip it,” answered Tilsen. “In tribal communities, traditional methods of production were based on ‘tiospaye’—the Oglala word for extended family structures,” Tilsen explained.  “That’s how we survived and how we took care of one another, organizing points of production in a cooperative way. It’s nothing foreign.”

Tilsen hopes to have Native American Natural Foods in employee hands by June, 2014.

Commonomics

Welcome to “Commonomics,” a new collaboration between YES! Magazine and GRITtv. Starting this month, we’ll be traveling the country asking the question: what makes for a strong local economy? It's not a question that produces easy answers.

Farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry defines economy this way: “I mean not economics but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth; the arts of adapting kindly the many, many human households to the earth’s many eco-systems and human neighborhoods.”

By now, we know the signs of a "household" that’s been hollowed out. We’ve seen the food deserts and the chronically vacant homes, the ghostly downtown storefronts and the municipalities in hock to the last sweet-talking corporation to suck up public subsidies and then run away. We’re familiar with the tension in a city where the only thing the rich and poor districts have in common is a subway line.  We know what it’s like to be close, everywhere, to the same chain coffee shop and two hours away from the “local” hospital. We’ve seen the sprawl that ate the woodlands and the floodwaters that steadily rose.

In Commonomics we’re going to look at communities that have had enough of all that; places where, by choice or by crisis, people are trying to figure out how to transform what they’ve known into something better for all.

There’s no consensus on the meaning of “local,” let alone agreement on what makes an economy “strong.” Ask 25 people with expertise in the topic, and you'll hear 25 different answers. (I know because that's what I did.) But there is history here, and a breadth of experience we can draw on if we pay attention, especially to those for whom “self-reliance” is not a lifestyle choice.

Wealthy communities, let’s face it, aren’t famous for their embrace of togetherness and sharing.  The wealthiest “local” economies are surrounded by locking gates.  In Commonomics, we’re going to talk with some of the people and groups who, when it comes to sustainability and localism, have often been excluded from the policymaking and the debate, and yet who may have the most rooted and innovative ideas for building strength.

I’m reminded of the words of J. Bob Alotta, executive director of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, referring to the disproportionately low-income LGBT groups she funds: “To be unsafe inside your own skin can be isolating but it is also a value proposition…It begets the possibility of building community in ways that may seem old fashioned.”

Nevertheless, even the best community builders need structural support. Policymakers and economic developers typically fall into two camps: “hunters” and “gatherers.” The former look to tempt big businesses from elsewhere to move to where they are by showering them with tax breaks and benefits that simultaneously siphon money out of a local area. Commonomics will focus on the gatherers, those who are working to foster economic growth from within. We’ll be asking what’s working, what isn’t, and by what standard are our local economies to be judged? Environmental health, unemployment, social mobility; there are many relevant metrics. We’ll prioritize poverty reduction and quality of life.

Beyond GDP: Measuring What Matters

Aggregate counts of economic activity like gross domestic product, or GDP, give all activity equal value. The cultivating of an urban farm, which may involve little paid work and consume few bought materials, is less “productive,” in GDP terms, than paving that farm over.

“When grain prices go up, that’s good for GDP but terrible for hunger," says Joshua Farley, a professor in community development and applied economics at the University of Vermont. "GDP is an excellent measure of cost; a terrible measure of benefit.”

To even start a new conversation, we need new measurements. As the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) puts it, it’s time to start “measuring what matters.”

Farley’s been involved in studies of Burlington, Vt., using a Genuine Progress Indicator, a version of the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare that looks at a community's overall well-being. There are many variations of these alternative indicators. Though most still equate value with consumption and growth, some include factors that GDP leaves out—like the value of unpaid household and volunteer work—and factor in the cost of pollution, depletion of resources, and the consequences of uneven distribution of wealth.

We don’t yet measure the real costs of these problems in the United States, because, for example, we tend to underprice energy, transportation, and education, and pay no tax on environmental pollution.

According to Robert Reich, former U.S. Labor Secretary and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “A true tally of all that might reveal the value of being more local."

What is a local economy, anyway?

"Local" has become a buzzword. There’s “Eco-localism,” local food and local farming, local media movements, and regional, state, and even national ad campaigns urging us to “eat local," "buy local," and "put local first." Local's gone global, but what exactly does it mean?

I bought the desk I’m writing on on eBay. I’ve saved a pretty antique from the dump and spared the environment the cost of a bit of fresh manufacturing. I’ve helped some eBay merchant’s “local” economy. But compared to the closest furniture factory, is that nice eBay seller in Oklahoma contributing more or less in terms of jobs and taxes? The mind boggles. 

Stacy Mitchell, director of independent business and community banking initiatives at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, says “local” varies (CLICK TO ENLARGE)by sector of the economy. Retail and banking businesses can be considered local if the owners are within a certain geographic area. But every village is not going to start making its own jet aircraft. “Talking manufacturing, you may need to be talking regional or statewide,” says Mitchell.

Geography matters less than goals, she continues: “The goal is having community-led, community-controlled economies where the decision-making is by those who are feeling the effects of the decisions that are made. [We need] humanly scaled systems both in economics and politics.”

At the American Sustainable Business Council, David Levine talks about the “triple bottom line” of social, environmental, and economic impacts.

“Within that frame, local by itself is not enough,” he says. Levine does not want people buying “local first” from a locally owned sweatshop or toxic chemical plant. To avoid that, what’s important to business owners and consumers alike, he says, is that there be “transparency around values.”

“The so-called local economy is really best understood as a regional transaction,” says Anthony Flaccavento, a family farmer, community leader, and small-business owner from Abingdon, Va.

“You need to think regionally. What does your region support ecologically and where are the markets? The hyper-local focus, within five or 100 miles is foolish.  Most goods travel 2,000 miles. If you can build something [to substitute] within 500 miles you’ve made a major impact.”

To Flaccavento, who built a nationally recognized nonprofit, Appalachian Sustainable Development, a critical indicator of a strong local economy is what he calls “synergy”—how much one positive action ignites another.  A few large employers help anchor a community’s economy, for sure, but when a community is depending on one or two entities to keep a place ticking over, it’s vulnerable to devastation should that single employer move out.  That company may get a better deal somewhere else in tax breaks or community services.

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)Buying local is not enough—we have to change the rules

To make the substantial shifts that we need, it’s going to take more than consumers buying local, says Michael Shuman, research director of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). It’s going to require tilting the policy landscape toward local businesses. Rather than simply lecturing consumers on buying local, government will have to lead by doing likewise.  The government’s purse is a whole lot more powerful than Joe and Jane Consumer’s. There are many things cities and states already do to benefit business—like offering subsidies, grants, and loans.  Cities are experimenting with different ways to direct those public benefits to locally owned businesses that benefit the public, and through government contracting and procurement. Some, like Cleveland, award extra points in the contract bidding process to businesses that are locally owned, or green, or pay prevailing wages, or hire local workers, or all of the above. But so far, policymakers have generally been reluctant to cut the multinationals off. Charging discrimination, internationally owned firms have been known to challenge local preference rules under international trade law and the fear of lawsuits puts an effective chill on legislators.

But, says Flaccavento, “If you’re promoting downtown revitalization and supporting small business, you can’t simultaneously build a big box development on the outskirts of town. One will undermine the other."

Shuman wants government to move its money—all of it, “including everything that requires city staff time and energy, from non-local business and refocus it instead—laser-like—on local business.”

Who is part of a strong local economy?

Which brings us back to Wendell Berry’s idea of the “household.” There’s not a lawmaker in America who thinks he has more money than his community needs. Deploying that public purse is all about making choices. How are you going to manage the household?  And who’s seen and heard in your economic “house”? The human household is a many-faceted thing, not to mention multinational, which can make the language of “local” contentious. Can disparaging non-local businesses spill over into discriminating against non-local workers? Just whom do we call a “local” anyway and do they have to speak our language?

Local arts ...

“It’s important to do the right kind of asset mapping,” says Sam Miller, director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Communities with robust local economies create environments where artists can thrive and work. Artists “hire workers, rent space, make stuff, sell it,” says Miller. Good arts policy is good development policy, and vice versa. Don’t fetishize artists, fund them: “When you’re defining a economic cluster, do you include artists in the same way you’d include web developers?”

... and local media.

The strongest local communities have local independent media—think Berkeley, Boulder, Tampa (all are community-radio rich). “People need to be well informed about what’s happening where they live and how it relates to what’s going on around them. People need to get to know each other and be shown a way to respond to the challenges they face,” says Jo Ellen Kaiser, executive director of The Media Consortium, a collaborative organization of independent media outlets (both GRITtv and YES! are members).  Put an independent media center in your downtown development district and you give it voice.

Artisanal crafts and local produce are attractive. But if you're going to serve everybody, scale matters. Wealthy communities can afford to do a lot of sexy things that poor communities cannot because no money is coming in.  That’s why Dan Swinney believes manufacturing needs to be part of the strong local economy too.

A former machinist who established Manufacturing Renaissance in Chicago, Swinney works in communities that have become job-poor due to globalization and the closure of local businesses for lack of next-generation owners and managers. “A lot of people ignore the material aspect of things,” he said.

“You can have jobs that build people or destroy people but you need an employment base.”  Swinney would prefer ownership of his company be local and democratic. He's all for ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans) and is in favor of co-ops with worker ownership and worker control. But, he says, “There’s a sequence from lower to higher value.” Swinney’s first priority is on getting people into jobs.

Getting institutions on board

What’s exciting about getting people engaged in local community-building is getting people engaged in how their community works. But if and when people want to change that, “locals” need not just local shops and arts, but institutions that influence policy.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is, at last, no longer the only business group at most negotiating tables. “I think it’s fair to say there’s a blossoming of alternative economic development models and business associations,” says Greg LeRoy, of Good Jobs First, a group that debunks what it calls the business lobby’s “pseudo-science” around what’s good for the “business climate."  There's also—among many others—BALLE, the Independent Business Alliance, the Main Street Alliance, and the American Sustainable Business Council.

“There’s much broader thinking now, more rooted in the local community, that’s able to weigh in on development debates such that the Chamber doesn’t have a monopoly any more,” LeRoy says.

On the worker side, “a strong local economy would have to have collective organizing of workers in order to be fully democratic,“ says Michael Lighty, policy director of National Nurses United, based in Oakland, Calif.  “Unions are the key institutions that give individuals collective power.”

Still, “The new economy for us is not simply about peppering the landscape with groovy models, but is part of broader economic justice organizing and political action,” says Sarah Ludwig, founder and co-director of the New Economy Project in New York. Unless there's broad institutional change—breaking up big banks, effecting some semblance of corporate accountability, getting money out of politics, "you know, just for starters," Ludwig says—"The creation of model institutions will take us only so far."

The most participatory local budgeting process isn’t going to stop the crisis in public schools as long as the budget the community’s participating in is an austerity budget. Which brings us to the question of power.

 

So how do ordinary people get power in this economy?

 

From Mississippi to Pine Ridge, allies abound for policymakers, entrepreneurs, and those who want to build strong local economies. But how do those potential allies build power enough to have an influence?

On the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Saket Soni works with guest workers. Arriving in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he saw firsthand the decimation of an entire local economy and the eradication of local control—and he watched, up close, the consequences.

“The logic of the corporate model after Katrina was to create a predatory community that could funnel local people into low-wage work with a revolving door to deportation or prison without creating a single stable job or career path for the most vulnerable," says Soni. Guest workers from other countries were brought in on temporary visas with virtually no rights in a labor supply chain that left local workers out. Antagonism between groups grew just as plans for the area’s reconstruction were being decided, and low-income communities suffered as a result. Over time, immigrant and local reconstruction workers organized together, and started demanding of Congress that the labor abuses be stopped. After some of their demands were met and fines were levied by government, some of those same organizations got involved in housing and local development planning too.

“The other side [of the crisis]," Soni says, "was that at the center of the ruin, a core of resilient people, who were in crisis long before the recession, had the vision and relationships to make a set of economic demands and organize to win them.”

What holds people back from doing more themselves is need, he adds. The low-wage workers he organizes don’t plan their lives more than a week or two in advance. They’re not allowed to by the economy. “They don’t know their next shift, their next job, even the industry they’ll be working in next week.”

In Soni’s world, the measure of a strong and rooted local economy lies in families' and communities' ability to imagine, and plan for, their future. That affects everything, including organizing, he says.

“No one wants a sustainable future and a shareable economy more than the low-wage workers we organize.”

You’ll be seeing more reports, from Jackson, New Orleans, Pine Ridge, and other frontlines of the “strong local economy” movement right here in Commonomics. And we hope you’ll contribute your news and ideas.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

Laura Flanders

Best-selling author and broadcaster Laura Flanders is the "strong local economies" fellow at Yes! Magazine and a contributing writer to The Nation. She hosts "The Laura Flanders Show" on GRITtv, an independent source for in-depth interviews with forward thinking people. Sign up to receive the latest at GRITtv.org or facebook.com/grittv. On Twitter, she's @GRITlaura.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/19313-welcome-to-commonomics-how-to-build-local-economies-strong-enough-for-everyone

Rethinking Sustainable Development in terms of Commons

by Helene Finidori, originally published by P2P Foundation  | TODAY

Wouldn’t sustainable development initiatives, mechanisms and policies considerably gain in effectiveness if they were planned and assessed in relation to the principles, processes and practices of the commons?

The commons are a social system that intimately associates people or stakeholders with their resources and the participatory and mindful ways they are managing/producing/caring for them. Commons can be described in a variety of ways and along several dimensions. The three below function together as a whole:

• As object, the commons are the Common Wealth, the assets that we inherit or create, use and change, and that serve our livelihood (our natural, social and cultural resources, genetic and biological diversity, knowledge, etc), that people pass on to future generations. These assets need to be nurtured, (re)generated and to be indiscriminately accessible to the greatest number. They must therefore be protected against capture, over-exploitation, depletion and abuse.

• As practice, the commons are the Common Ethos of which people are an integral part; the culture and the relationships they build with each other, withtheir resources and with the earth, the ways of being and doing in common (caring, sharing, nurturing, replenishing our common assets with discernment, transparency, empathy, equity, justice, mindfulness…). This practice critically depends on sustained and adaptive know-how, on increased knowledge flows, and continuous collaboration and learning including ways of working together on problem solving. This practice takes multiple forms and names. Sustainable living and development is one of them.

• As result, the commons are the Common Good, the outcomes of the practice (access, capacity, well being, quality of life, prosperity, abundance). They are the life blood of the process, those that make the world thrive, and become in turn assets to nurture…

Because of the relationships and interactions between these various elements, the commons are generative systems, which provide the tangible conditions that empower and enable communities in relation to their purpose and to the ecological contexts they find themselves in, at various levels and scales.

 

From this perspective, commons may serve as a medium for accelerating the adoption of sustainable practices that address social, environmental and economic dimensions in a cohesive and interconnected manner. Thus they help achieve sustainable development goals in a sustainable and robust manner.

 

Commons, open access resources, public domain must be protected

Today, organizations and in particular corporations in the private sector have multiple ways of protecting themselves against risks, depletion or abuse of their own assets, and of making provisions for regenerating their assets, or measuring and improving their intangible outputs…

 

Some of this has been secured through enclosure and appropriation of the commons or public domain assets as a means to maximize profit and capture value added and by transferring (externalizing) part of their risks and costs to society.

 

The commons for their part, have little means of protection and securing risks, assets and governance. In particular, public domain or open access resources are increasingly being privatized in order to have an ‘owner’ rather than be left to ‘mismanagement’ by the public sector or abuse by free riders -aka tragedy of the commons. This has had a devastating effect on access to resources and livelihoods of the poorest.

 

In particular when corporation start getting involved in the sustainability discussions, we need some criteria for knowing where to go. What could distinguish genuinely effective corporate sustainability policies and practices from what is regularly been decried as business as usual or greenwashing? What could prevent corporate sustainability initiatives or sustainability goals and policies to be either looked at suspiciously or considered as the silver bullet without any actual way to discriminate between the two?We are here on relatively new territory. Business’ endeavors have long been by construction dedicated to making the most profit out of what can be exploited -’supercharging’ productivity of human endeavor, or ‘drawing nutrients’ from the soil, to name a few, as highlighted in the latest UN Global Compact report. This is a revealing vocabulary, and there are fine lines between sustainable practices and over-exploitation to identify and watch. It is crucial that the sustainable endeavors of business or any human activity be conducted in a sustainable way, with a focal point that can connect all issues and efforts, and serve as a ‘vetting’ system to gage the sustainability of initiatives. The commons can be this connector and vetting system. The fine line has to do with whether and how an activity protects and nurtures the commons and public domain, which as living system give some materiality to the interconnections between the social, the economic and the environment.Because of their inherently fragile and exposed nature and their strong connections to human rights, the commons in all their dimensions must be protected. It is important that the principles and provisions for the commons, associating common assets, people and the modalities for taking care of the assets in an open and transparent way come to mind when creating policy and making tradeoffs in negotiations. Creating institutions to defend the commons and inscribing the principles of the commons in constitutions and law to protect the public domain would be a necessary step to start the process.

Below are a few provisions and principles related to the commons that could help design and assess sustainability initiatives, mechanisms and policies. They must be seen as a whole and be monitored in relation to one another.

 

Non discriminatory access to resources:

History is filled with stories of enclosures and abuses of the commons. Any sustainable development goal should be associated with a non discriminatory access to resources. The latest developments around water are the most compelling. Asserting their right to the commons, the Bolivian people have reclaimed the management of their water utility in Cochabamba in 2000. The Italian city of Naples rejected the privatization of waterby referendum with a strong majority in 2011. Elinor Ostrom, nobel prize winner in economics in 2009 for her work on the commons, has shown that with adequate governance rules and application of know-how by communities, the tragedy of the commons did not apply and communities were better off.

 

People involved directly must participate in their own destiny and the decision making process

Communities must be encouraged and educated to cultivate and produce their own livelihoods and co-govern their utilities, services and resources, in relational dynamics that foster self-realization and adaptation.

 

When people consciously manage those resources that they and their children depend on for their survival and well-being, they tend to take good care of them. This is also part of Elinor Ostrom’s findings. That’s what makes the commons a system, with people (commoners) taking care (commoning) of their common assets (common goods). Commons cannot exist without commoners and commoning. This is the motto of the advocates of the commons approach.

 

Communities, groups and individuals develop a sense of ownership of the process, a sense of immediacy and transparency, of shared destiny and emotional experience that foster trust and resilience, and a shared ‘commons sense’. Local collaboration and peer to peer (P2P) dependencies are something graspable and immediate, and also expand awareness of what empowers one another and larger systems.

 

One very important characteristic of the commons is that stakeholders equitably share responsibility and benefits for the resources and context that they share, and that they govern and manage these in an open and transparent manner.

 

Commons based development helps people develop livelihoods and take charge of their own future in a sustainable and resilient way and can help sustainable development.

 

Anydefinition of the commons should associate the people who have a stake with open and transparent modes of governance.

 

Non discriminatory access to knowledge and right to share

Non-discriminatory access must protect the right to use, to share and to contribute knowledge and skills to distributed and open standard technologies that sustain the commons.

 

Know-how and knowledge are critical to managing a commons effectively. Needed know-how is related to practices as well as understanding each other and how to work together as a whole.

 

Both must be learned, promoting “connections” conversations to help build on interactions and facilitate integrated shifts in larger and smaller scale practices allowing stakeholders to discover new ways to solve their mutual problems.

 

Those who take from the commons must contribute to the commons.

Human activity benefits from access to all kinds of available resources and possibilities -the commons. This access to commons enables progress and development, but if there is a lack of awareness and protection, the commons are abused.

 

This is probably the toughest challenge for sustainable development, to shift from an ‘exploitative’ mindset (every possibility and resource whether natural, cultural, biological resource is there to be mined whatever the consequences) that has been cultivated by our western education system, to one that is mindful and aware of its limits. And that’s where we believe the commons can help, because the commons as a system give some materiality to the interconnections between social, economic and environment, with some meaning attached and can help ‘measure’ it.

 

Because the commons are a medium for development that needs to grow, it is important that any actor in the system become aware of how he benefits from the commons and how he may deplete or abuse the commons, so that he can make positive contributions to the commons by restoring or regenerating what has been depleted, or by sharing in the public domain or common pool some of the knowledge, know-how or added value generated in the process.

 

Open source software typically functions based on this principle. Anyone can take the existing code freely and improve it and then request his changes to be incorporated in the main code as a way to sustain the commons.

 

On the tangible side, depleting resources and soils, polluting rivers or endangering public health are ways of taking from the commons, as much as enclosure and over-exploitation of resources.

 

On the intangible side, inventors or creators benefit from existing knowledge and capabilities. Isaac Newton wrote: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” meaning his discoveries were built on previous discoveries. Disney built an empire on animating tales that were in the public domain, but to date gave nothing back to the commons. Copyright laws are regularly being expanded to provide continued exploitation rights for licenses that could have been returned to the public domain long ago.

 

There is a fine line between protection and enclosure, between protection from abusive copy by competitors and closing access for the public to a whole domain of possibilities and enabling factors thus creating artificial scarcity. This line is clearly crossed if intellectual property rights do more to stifle than reward current creativity activity, or promote the destruction of cultural heritage.

 

Depletion or enclosure of the commons is a cost for society, a transfer of a cost from those few who reap the benefits of first access to the commons to society as a whole. These transfers must cease. Simply applying a tax or opening up rights to deplete fails to produce the awareness and conscience of what is at stake and to validly change the way things are done.

 

Value network analysis should be undertaken to establish how commons value is generated and flows into activities, how value is transformed by the activity, how it is captured and what ultimately comes out of the activity as output.

 

Economics must concentrate on growing the commons. Growth that depletes the commons must be stopped

The commons are both an input to the dynamic interactions mentioned above and their output. For progress to materialize for all, or for development to really be sustainable, our common assets must remain stable or increase. The commons in all their diversity and all the types of value they create must grow. Ideally each sustainability initiative should be geared towards growing the commons and the number of those who can access and benefit from the livelihood the commons enables,while preventing their depletion. Finance must be used to grow the commons

 

Focus on needs, use value and regenerative models rather than on exchange value and material flows

Our economy’s current purpose is to maximize flows of material in a linear extract, transform, dispose type of model on the basis of artificial abundance (exponential drawing on resources as if they were endless), and to maximize exchange value by generating artificial scarcities (via enclosures of vital resources, including seeds and knowledge). It is a machine for perpetual growth that uses its profits and its knowledge to continually escalate its demands on humanity and on the earth and to constantly multiply its capacity to inflate itself as private wealth and power. As it faces limitations of real resources, it is brittle and prone to breakdown, undermining productive activity as well as leading to the abuse of the commons in a never ending spiral.

 

The challenge we are facing is to ensure the conditions under which our economy can be viable and sustainable, and improve at the same time the material and non-material (intellectual, emotional, spiritual…) wellbeing of the people, and the viability of the commons that enables it.

 

Focus must be put on regenerative models such as “circular economy” based on closed loops and systems resilience, and new approaches of production, consumption and ownership that optimize the flow of goods and services over time in relation to a diminishing size of non renewable resources that can give way to new approaches of business co-evolution and integration of the commons that do not assume abundance of finished resources and do not base business models on artificial scarcity.

 

Monitoring at the system level: Triple monitoring of status of an asset, usage of a practice AND resulting outcome

Indicators must be set up to monitor the three dimensions of the commons together to make sure that one of the dimensions does not grow to the detriment of the others. The approach is iterative, to test how things behave on the ground through trial and error, tolerance for mistakes and ongoing reflection.

 

Difficulties and precautions in the applications of these principles

• Really empowering those who need it the most, associating people in the decision process, and changing the power distribution from centralized to decentralized, from ‘west’ to ‘south’. This means letting go of some forms of power and control.
• Avoiding potential co-optation and misappropriation of the process if applied in a non systemic manner without associating people/practices with assets and outcomes to their specific contexts. Corporations -or any other type of organization- cannot assume the right to unilaterally govern or manage, and therefore enclose, the commons or what is currently in the public domain.
• Monitoring for unintended consequences and finding the points of limit when something beneficial can become toxic because conditions have changed or because over utilization of a practice or model and reduction of the variety of possible responses affects resilience and can make things brittle.
• Finding the balance between the fair protection against unfair competition and fair compensation of research and initial investments and the enclosure of whole domains of activity and resources, creating artificial scarcities that put the users/consumers/communities at the mercy of ‘the markets’ and of abuse of dominant positions.

Questions to be asked when making policy recommendations, reassessed through on-going monitoring processes.

In particular as a vetting process and means to identify potential tradeoffs

• How is it linked to the commons as a system?
• What context does it address?
• What people/practices, assets and outcomes does it associate?
• What dimension of the commons does it grow/stop depleting?
• What dimensions of the commons does it put at risk?
• What are the consequences on other external commons?
• Which are the trade-offs to condider?
• What are the risks of enclosure, abuse, over-exploitation?
• Who has access? How is over-usage and depletion protected?
• How is enclosure, appropriation, abusive exploitation prevented?
• Who are the stakeholders? How are they involved?
• How open and transparent are the decision processes and modes of governance?
• Where does the power lie?
• What are the learning and conflict resolution mechanisms in place?
• How does this contribute to empowering and enabling self-realization and self-healing at the individual and community level?
• What elements or circumstances could make it become detrimental to the commons?
• What are the assessment and correction mechanisms in place?
• How are assets, practices and outcomes assessed in inter-related ways?
• What are the mechanisms in place to avoid misinterpretation and misappropriation of the goal, target and indicator?

---

This is adapted from a recommendation I posted to the UN-NGLS Civil Society Consultation on SDG’s following the release of four UN Reports that will help determine the global post-2015 agenda for sustainable development. It is available as a collaborative document in the Institutionalizing the Commons project group that will further work on framing the commons principles for them to be better embedded in constitution, law and policy at various levels. To pursue the work at the UN, but also at the EU, national, regional and local institutional levels. Please join the group to start collaborating!

Take action!  

Make connections via our GROUPS page
Start your own projects. See our RESOURCES page.

Tags:  

policy

resilient communities

sustainable development

the commons

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-10-23/rethinking-sustainable-development-in-terms-of-commons