Commons Transition Primer – short version

If you agree with these proposals and feel inspired to be part of the Commons Transition, you may wonder, “what can I do as an individual?” It is difficult to become a commoner from one day to the other. Most of us have not been educated in ways of creating and distributing value together. In short, the Commons Transition begins with you… but always continues with others.

http://commonstransition.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Bauwens-Niaros-Urban-Commons-Transitions.pdf

Towards a Coherent Institutional Design for Public-Commons Partnerships

3.1 The basic concepts underlying public commons partnerships

Thinking of social and political change in terms of a commons transition strategy requires a profound rethink of our existing institutional mix, and somewhat of a new vocabulary. What follows is a short introduction to this
vocabulary, which is important to understanding our institutional design proposals in this chapter.

In Section 1.1 we made the argument, based on the insights of Karatani (2014) and Polanyi (1944), that the crisis of the capital-state-nation is systemic, and that the current task of societal transformers is not just a restoration of this triad, but a simultaneous transformation of each of them into a new system configuration centered around the commons as central mechanism. This new system, by analogy of the institutional emergence of ‘really existing peer production’, appears as follows:

• It puts the commons (and not the market) at its center, and civic society becomes the locus of the institutions of the commons. All inhabitants are considered to be productive commoners, co-constructing the various
  commons that fit their passions, skillsets and social needs;
• The market is transformed towards a generative market, which serves the accumulation of the commons (not the accumulation of capital). Or alternatively, where the accumulation of capital directly serves the
  accumulation of the commons; and
• The state or common good institutions, such as the city and its institutions, are seen as facilitating mechanisms to create the right public frameworks for individual and social autonomy. They enable and facilitate commons-friendly infrastructures. We have called this the Partner State model (Bauwens & Kostakis, 2014; Kostakis, 2011) and can speak of the Partner City as the equivalent on the scale of the urban.

Changing Societies through Urban Commons Transitions

This vision has profound consequences for institutional design. First, it requires a move away from binary thinking, i.e. the market-state binary, to a triarchical format. We need institutions for all three, i.e. the commons, the
state, and the market, but with the commons at the core. This also means a move away from public-partnerships, towards public-commons partnerships. These partnerships are augmented by generative market entities, eventually also with classic market entities moving in the direction of generativity. The poly-governance mechanisms and institutions discovered by Elinor Ostrom (1990) as the hallmark of the management of commons resources becomes the new normal in institutional design. Poly-governance structures, possibly matched by appropriate property mechanisms, consists at least of the three levels (commons, state and market) but can be even more fine-grained, as the work of Foster & Iaione (2016) has suggested 40.

For the bureaucratic state functions that get their legitimacy exclusively from electoral majorities, this means a change towards the commonification of public services, in which the traditional and bureaucratic hierarchies
are augmented, transformed, or replaced, by poly-governance models of participation and deliberation that include commoners and other stakeholders.  The logic of representation needs to be augmented by the logic of contribution, towards the model of a super-competent democracy or ‘democracy+’. Please note there is a tension between the participatory mode of democracy, which can be seen as a top-down mode of consultation under the direction of the city, and contributory democracy, whereby the city has to adapt to pre-existing practices from its most active citizens. We are proposing the latter model. Public-commons partnerships and the commonification of public services in the context of a partner state mean the possibility of making ‘Commons Accords’, i.e. agreements between the ‘partner city’ and the commoners. In economic terms, seeing society as commons-centric means the reorganization of the main provisioning systems around commons-based models.

In our conclusions from our study in Ghent (Bauwens & Onzia, 2017), we have seen that commons-centric seed forms exist for every existing provisioning system, such as food, shelter, mobility etc., and they are going through significant growth and the early beginnings of integration. Our proposal will show how the city administration can integrate and work with the emerging commons formats, essential for sustainable production models and climate change goals.

This new logic has also important implications for economic policy. In the 40 These authors propose a ‘quintuple helix’ model of poly-governance in the cited work. Changing Societies through Urban Commons Transitions 53
longer term, it requires thinking about generative, not extractive, models of economic activity. This means thinking around the key fault line: Does a particular economic activity not only show compatibility with the carrying capacity of its supporting environment but ‘generate value for both its natural resource base, and the human communities that are co-creating the commons on which these economic entities are co-dependent’? In the short term, it means setting up the required support frameworks so that generative commons practices get the same level of support as the classic extractive models of the economy.

Below we also introduce concepts aimed at a convergence between the commons and generative economic forms:

• Open cooperatives: Cooperative economic forms that are generative vis a vis the commons, i.e. they can accept the contributory logic of the commons and help expand the commons by creating livelihoods for the commoners. Open cooperatives are distinct from cooperative models that are merely ‘collectively capitalist’, i.e. they compete in the marketplace for the benefit of their members only.
• Platform cooperatives: Collectively owned platforms for the exchange economy, in which the platform itself is a commons. These are an alternative to the extractive platform capitalism promoted by firms like
  Uber and AirBnB, which exhibit many negative social and environmental externalities.
• Protocol cooperativism: Open and platform cooperatives mutualize the technical knowledge and infrastructures which they need to operate, thereby avoiding wasteful fragmentation and wasted efforts.

We believe cities have a role in supporting the creation of these universal commons infrastructures which can be used by various cities and adapted to local circumstances. Think of a MuniBnb, a public-commons alliance of cities and commoners which would hold the ‘protocols’ to enable fairly distributed hospitality services.

3.2 How is the Commons Transition Plan in Ghent related to the FLOK Society Project in Ecuador?

In 2014, Michel Bauwens was asked to direct a research project for a Commons Transition Plan for the government of Ecuador, which was requested by three governmental institutions41. This was done during a six-month period with a team of six researchers drawn from the P2P Foundation network. The remit was to research how to plan a transition towards a ‘social knowledge economy’. This would transform Ecuador from a country dependent on limited extractive resources, such as mining or agricultural exports, to a country dependent on abundant immaterial resources, such as knowledge and culture.

This work resulted in a Commons Transition Plan (Bauwens, 2014), which had a more limited focus than the research and plan for Ghent. Indeed, given the remit, we had to focus on imagining how the Ecuadorian society and
economy would organize itself around knowledge commons for each domain of activity (scientific commons, education commons, etc.). Although this allowed us to look at the material preconditions for each of these knowledge commons, it did not allow us to focus directly on the material commons and provisioning systems, as we could do in Ghent. Nevertheless, the ability to do a first thorough research and scenario planning exercise on the mechanics of a commons transition, was still a historical first and the work in Ghent was greatly facilitated by this prior experience.

We should also add that the political context was entirely different. In Ghent, we could count on the enthusiastic support of the city coalition, of engaged functionaries and a fairly mature commons sphere in the city. In contrast, factions in the Ecuadorian government were staunchly opposed to this work, and Ecuador had a sociology that was very limiting in terms of potential social support for such a program. The uptake of our proposals was therefore very small, except for some limited advances regarding intellectual property law, and it could be argued that the Ecuadorian government even took a sharp extractive turn afterwards, as exemplified by its decision to open up Yasuni National Park to oil extraction (Vidal, 2016).

In all, the urban context seemed much more mature than the nation-state level, in terms of the kind of transition described here. While building on this prior experience, our proposals for Ghent go much further in detail, as
they focus both on material provisioning systems and on public-commons institutional design, not just on ‘immaterial’ knowledge commons. 41 The National Institute of Advanced Studies; the Coordinating Ministry of Knowledge and Human Talent; and the National Secretary for Science and Innovation.

3.3 A three-pronged strategy for the commons transition 

How do we get from the current market state and market city configurations to commons-centric institutions? We believe that the model of the Energiewende in Germany shows a workable strategy for social, political and institutional change. We propose therefore a strategy in three phases 42:

• The first phase is the emergence and formation of alternative commons-based seed forms that solve the systemic issues of the current dominant political economy. For example, the carbon-producing activities of fossil fuel extraction needs to be replaced by a strategy focusing on the development and expansion of renewable energy. We are seeing that successful transitions, as those in Germany, depend on a large part on civic mobilization around commons-centric models of provisioning, such as the emergence of community-owned energy cooperatives. In this first phase, the focus is on promoting commons alternatives and
  their interconnection into integrated sub-systems, first of all within and then across provisioning systems. This emergence and expansion of commons-based alternatives is matched by the necessary growth
  of social, and eventually, political power. For example, in the case of Energiewende, the growth of energy coops was matched by the political power of the Greens, and the realization after Fukushima by Merkel of the dead-end and dangers of nuclear power (Mueller 2017).
• The second phase is a regulatory and institutional phase in which the right frameworks are put in place. Without proper frameworks and supportive regulations, the commons-centric model would have
  remained marginal and grown much more slowly. But once the feedin tariff was in place, the new models could expand to the broader population, as they were ‘facilitated’ by incentives that made the
  commons-based alternative economically interesting for non-idealistic citizens.
• The creation of the proper regulatory support and new institutional design creates the basis for the third phase, i.e. the normalization of the new practices from the margins to the new normal. In this phase,
  generative market forms support the continuing expansion of the commons-centric practices, with support from the partner state or partner city institutional frameworks.42

This strategy is a simplified version of what is described in the the ‘multi-level perspective’ literature of social change, a heuristic model distinguishing and articulating the complex dynamics between the ‘niches’, ‘regimes’ and ‘landscape’ levels of ‘socio-technical systems’ (Geels, 2010).

It becomes obvious that these three phases are not entirely separated and follow up on each other, but that they significantly interpenetrate. A significant amount of commons-based seed forms are required to even know what kind of supportive institutional frameworks will be most adequate. Similarly, the generative economic frameworks enabled by the regulatory institutions need sufficiently strong commons to depend on.
Finally, this scheme is of course focused on the political economy and structural aspects of change that cannot be undertaken without significant cultural, intersubjective and subjective changes. Those are not examined in
the context of this treatment.

3.4. An institutional design for the city administration

We can now proceed to the description of our proposals as featured in the Commons Transition Plan for the city of Ghent43 (Bauwens & Onzia, 2017). The general logic of our proposals is to put forward realistic but important institutional innovations that can lead to further progress and expansion of the urban commons, so that it can successfully achieve its ecological and social goals. We propose public-social or public-commons based processes and protocols to streamline cooperation between the city and the commoners in every field of human provisioning.

The following figure shows the basic collaboration process between commoners and the public good institutions of the ‘partner city’.43 We are not fully summarizing all proposals here, which are available in the
official Dutch-language report which is in the process of being translated to English in full, but merely the underlying logic.

As we can see, commons initiatives can forward their proposals and need for support to a City Lab, which prepares a ‘Commons Accord’ between the city and the commons initiative, modeled after the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons. Based on this contract, the city sets up specific support alliances which combine the commoners and civil society organisations, the city itself, and the generative private sector, in order to organize support flows.

This first institutional arrangement described here allows for permanent ad hoc adaptations and the organization of supportive frameworks to enable more support for the common-based initiatives. But just as importantly, this
support needs to be strategized in the context of the necessary socio-ecological transitions, which is the purpose of the second set of proposals, as outlined in the following figure:
Figure 7: A public-commons institutional design for the social and ecological transition

This figure describes a cross-sector institutional infrastructure for commons policy-making and support, divided in ‘transitional platforms’’ or as we call them on the figure ‘Sustainability Empowerment Platforms’. The model
comes from the existing practice in Ghent around the food transition, which is far from perfect and has its problems, but nevertheless has in our opinion the core institutional logic that can lead to more successful outcomes in the future.

The city has indeed created an initiative called Gent en Garde, which accepts the five aims of civil society organisations active in the food transition (local organic food, fairly produced) that works as follows: The city has initiated a Food Council, which meets regularly and contributes to food policy proposals; it is representative of the current forces at play and has both the strength and weaknesses of representative organisations; but it also counts in its membership, the ‘urban food working group’, which mobilizes those effectively working at the grassroots level on that transition; the group follows a contributive logic, where every contributor has a voice. In our
opinion, this combination of representative and contributory logic is what can create a super-competent Democracy+ institution that goes beyond the limitations of representation and integrates the contributive logic of the
commoners. This model mixes the representative logic and its legitimacy, the expertise available in public institutions, but crucially augments it with the contextually rich experience and expertise of the grassroots experts. It is
further augmented with the expertise of the generative businesses that are engaged in the necessary socio-ecological transitions.

But how can the commoners exert significant political weight so that political and representative institutions will actually ‘listen’ to them? This requires ‘voice’ and self-organisation. We therefore propose the creation of an Assembly of the Commons for all citizens active in the co-construction of commons, and a Chamber of the Commons for all those who are creating livelihoods around these commons, in order to create more social, economic and ultimately, political power for the commons (see Section 2.1).

This essential process of participation that we have seen in the food transition area can be replicated across the transition domains, obtaining city and institutional support for a process leading to Energy as a Commons, Mobility as a Commons, Housing, Food, etc. These ‘transition arenas’ or ‘sustainability empowerment platforms’ integrate the goals and values necessary for a successful socio-ecological transition and allow for a permanent dialogue amongst all the stakeholders involved.

With this, we conclude the minimal generic structures that we believe a Partner City needs to support a transition towards commons-based civic and economic forms which can be integrated in democratic structures of
representation, enriching and complementing them, while stimulating the individual and collective autonomy of its citizens organized as commoners.

3.5. Other proposals

Some of the proposals included in the Ghent study merit special attention:

• A project to test the capacity of ‘cosmo-local production’ to create meaningful local jobs (organic food for school lunches) and to test the potential role of anchor institutions and social procurement;
• A pilot project around ‘circular finance’ in which ‘saved negative externalities’ that lead to savings in the city budget wich can directly be invested in the commons projects that have achieved such efficiencies (e.g re-investing the saved cost of water purification to support the acquisition of land commons for organic farmers); and
• As pioneered by the NEST project of temporary use of the old library, use more ‘call for commons’ instead of competitions44 between individual candidates. A ‘call for commons’ rewards the coalition that creates
  the best complementary solution between multiple partners and open sources its knowledge commons to support the widest possible participation.

Earlier in this report, we mentioned the experiment and prototypal work of Lunch met LEF, an initiative that aims to re-introduce healthy organic, local and ‘fair’ food to the city’s communal public schools, which serve five millions meals a year. It is an example of the kind of change that could be effected on the level of meaningful work and engagement, and real employment that involves all types of workers. We believe this is very important, as the rightwing populist movements are largely determined by the decline of well paid blue collar work. In this particular case, food would be sourced from urban and peri-urban farmers in the city and bioregion around Ghent, strengthening the generative food economy; a zero-carbon transportation system (cargobikes), would generate a second level of employment, with a final third layer of local cooking in the schools. These effects are congruent with our vision of ‘cosmolocal production’ (design global, manufacture local), outlined in Chapter 1, combining the world’s knowledge on healthy food and agricultural production, suitably contextualized, with relocalizing production and job opportunities. It is also congruent with the research showing that ‘Locally owned, import substituting (LOIS) businesses’ produce less ‘leakage’ and more employment and benefits for the local economy, alongside the obvious ecological advantages in terms of the biocapacity and carrying capacity of the region. If successful, and the 90% organic local production for Copenhagen’s schools shows that it can be, this model could be generalized by using the combined power of anchor institutions and social procurement. Anchor institutions are the institutions such as hospitals, schools, universities, public institutions, that are normally present in every neighborhood, and whose mighty combined procurement power can be used to finance such a shift and create more local employment in socially useful and meaningful work occupations. This strategy was pioneered
with the Evergreen Cooperative model in Cleveland, Ohio and Preston, UK. In this vision, the city supports local cooperative organizations that can service the anchor institutions. Social procurement is that wich integrates quality, social and ecological considerations in its briefs, legal even under the WTO regime, but wich also choose to divvy up procurement in order to make it 44 http://nest.gent/ more attractive to local business and less so to large external players. It has been practiced in Scotland, for example. Investments in this area are related to the circular finance concept. Mainstream businesses are wont to ignoring negative social and environmental
externalities in order to bring costs down and remain competitive. However, the costs of these externalities are routinely passed on to the public purse. This also means that cost savings in this area can be used to fund the
transition and the above-described job-creation strategy. Terre des Liens is a successful community land trust movement in France which buys land to put it outside the market and offers cheap rents to organic farmers. They told us about advanced discussions with local water authorities in France, since they realize that organic farmers substantially reduce the need to recycle and clear water (as well as substantial decreases in health expenditures). It is therefore possible to imagine agreements where by a percentage of such savings is used in a virtuous feedback loop to fund eco-social transitions that further reduce negative externalities. Large business firms like IBM have already practiced this by investing in Linux, the free software that substantially reduces the private investments of IBM.

The third important innovation we propose is the ‘call for commons’, pioneered by the NEST project, a temporary arrangement by a wide coalition of cultural initiatives to use the empty buildings of an old library, consisting
of eight floors. While classic funding and procurement competitions divide and rule, privatizing the knowledge and leading to huge waste of efforts, a call for commons is effectively its opposite: it stimulates cooperation,
commonifies the knowledge and avoids the waste. In a call for commons, the best cooperators are stimulated to create complementary coalitions. Over one month, the NEST coalition was able to offer a full use of the capacities of the building, with 70 participating organisations presenting a combined project, which included an open and contributive accounting system for the rent, in which the most active and nonprofit oriented projects paid much less than for-profit businesses. We believe such a call for commons should be institutionalized as a new protocol and institution for funding projects. Apart from the aforementioned projects, we also propose the following:

• The creation of a judicial assistance service consisting of at least one representative of the city and one of the commoners, in order to systematically unlock the potential for commons expansion by finding solutions for regulatory hurdles.
• One of our main findings was that commons-based initiatives face a multitude of obstacles to develop their new practices, and not just a lack of support. For example, in the housing sector, most legislation consists
  of promoting private housing and its speculative effects, and social housing with its bureaucratic rules and limitations.
• The creation of an incubator for a commons-based collaborative economy, which specifically deals with the challenges of generative start-ups. Nearly all support mechanisms are still geared towards extractive models of business, such as the venture-capital start-up model, most often designed to obtain quick market dominance and an exit of the founders, which often means that the investment will not benefit the region in the long term. These existing incubators are usually hostile to the creation of open knowledge commons and seek to privatize knowledge. Young entrepreneurs often don’t know a that there are generative alternatives, and don’t know where to find the right advice and support for these emerging practices.
• The creation of an investment vehicle, the bank of the commons, which could be a city bank based on public-social governance models. There is revival of public banking in the U.S. and other countries, given the failure of traditional banks to sufficiently invest in local productive economies rather than speculative ventures. The revenues of a city can be stored in a public-commons bank dedicated to local investment. • Augmenting the capacity of temporary land and buildings towards more permanent solutions to solve the land and housing crisis affecting commoners and citizens.  Temporary use programs, while very useful, do not solve the longer term issues created by ongoing real estate speculation and the rarefaction of urban land.
• Support of platform cooperatives as an alternative to the more extractive forms of the sharing economy. Assisting the development of mutualized commons infrastructures (‘protocol cooperativism’), through inter-city cooperation (avoiding the development of 40 Uber alternatives in as many cities). We suggest support for the development of local alternative platforms which keep the value in the region, but also the interlinking of leagues of cities to support the generic and universal infrastructural base needed for avoiding fragmented and repetitive investment and efforts.
• Make Ghent ‘the place to be’ for commoners by using ‘Ghent, City of the Commons’ as an open brand, to support the coming of visitors for commons-conferences, etc.  We believe there is an important opportunity to brand the city as a commons city, attracting visitors who can learn from the experience, and contribute to the transition in Ghent. With this, we conclude our review of a potential new institutional design for urban-centric transitions towards a commons-centric economic and societal development. This would allow for mutual recognition and support of the three key actors that should be at the core of a mobilization for such a transition:
  • A vibrant field of citizen activity around shared resources and provisioning systems;
  • A vibrant field of generative economic entities which create livelihoods for participating citizen-commoners and added value for society as a whole;
  • A vibrant field of public-commons ‘common good’ institutions that create the right and stimulating frameworks for personal and social autonomy.

While Ghent obviously provided a specific local context for this work, we do believe that some of the aspects described above do transcend the limitations of space and time, and could inspire other partner cities to start evolving in the same direction. How to imagine such a global cooperation is the final topic of this report.

3.6. Towards a global infrastructure for commonsbased provisioning

We have argued in this overview that we are in a conjuncture where commonsbased mutualizing is one of the keys for sustainability, fairness and globallocal well-being. In this conclusion, we suggest a global infrastructure in
which cities can play a crucial role.

See the graphic below for the stacked layer that we propose, which is described as follows:

• The first layer is the cosmo-local institutional layer. Imagine global forbenefit associations which support the provisioning of infrastructures for urban and territorial commoning. These are structured as global
  public-commons partnerships, sustained by leagues of cities which are co-dependent and co-motivated to support these new infrastructures and overcome the fragmentation of effort that benefits the most extractive and centralized ‘netarchical’ firms. Instead, these infrastructural commons organizations co-support MuniRide, MuniBnB, and other applications necessary to commonify urban provisioning systems (Orsi, 2015). These
  are the global “protocol cooperative” governance organizations.
• The second layer consists of the actual global depositories of the commons applications themselves, a global technical infrastructure for open sourcing provisioning systems. They consists of what is globally
  common, but allow contextualized local adaptations, which in turn can serve as innovations and examples for other locales. These are the actual ‘protocol cooperatives’, in their concrete manifestation as usable
  infrastructure.
• The third layer are the actual local (urban, territorial, bioregional) platform cooperatives, i.e. the local commons-based mechanisms that deliver access to services and exchange platforms for the mutualized used
  of these provisioning systems. This is the layer where the Amsterdam FairBnb and the MuniRide application of the city of Ghent organize the services for the local population and their visitors. It is where houses
  and cars are effectively shared.
• The potential fourth layer is the actual production-based open cooperatives, where distributed manufacturing of goods and services produces the actual material services that can be shared and mutualized
  on the platform cooperatives.
  Figure 8: City-supported cosmo-local production infrastructure.
  GLOBAL LOCAL
  Local public-commons alliances to support commons-based provisioning exchange
  e.g. Partago – electric car-sharing platform coop (Ghent); FairBnB (Amsterdam)
  Layer 3: Local / Bioregional Platform Coops – Actual Sharing and Exchange on Commonly-Owned Platforms
  Layer 2: Open Source Depositories for Commons-Based Infrastructure – Protocol Cooperative Technical Layer
  Open cooperatives for production
  e.g. Open design electric buses (Berlin); Lunch met Lef – fair, ecological and locally produced school lunches (Ghent)
  Layer 4: Distributed Production through Open Cooperatives
  e.g. Shelter as commons (MuniBnB); Mobility as commons (MuniRide)
  Layer 1: Institutional Layer – Protocol Cooperative Governance
  Local adaptations
  Global depositories

  Acknowledgments
  The authors are grateful to the Heinrich Böll Foundation for their ongoing support, and Heike Löschmann, Joanna Barelkowska and Joerg Haas for their critical feedback and help. We would also like to thank our colleagues from the P2P Foundation, Ann Marie Utratel and Stacco Troncoso, for handling the editing. Last, we would like to thank Elena Martínez Vicente for the design. All errors remain the authors’ sole responsibility.

**

David Bollier, in his paper for our “New Systems: Possibilities and Proposals” series exploring viable political-economic alternatives to the present order, suggests that a commons-based framework could provide a critical template for de-commodification, mutualization, and the organization and control of resources outside of the market.

We’re excited to share with you our latest animation that illustrates some of the principal features of David Bollier’s vision for how we can manage the commons cooperatively and fairly—through “commoning,” a process of social self-organization that creates new and innovative ways to equitably and sustainably manage shared resources.

Read David Bollier’s essay “Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm” from Volume 2 of our New Systems: Possibilities and Proposals series.

Originally published at The Next System