What is commoning?

When we engage in commoning, we’re essentially building and maintaining “commons” — these are the spaces, environments, institutions, resources, and values that groups or communities create and manage together.

Commons operate on a principle of self-organization. All members are involved in deciding democratically how resources will be used, produced, distributed, and circulated. It’s all about fair and inclusive governance that also takes seriously human and environmental wellbeing. 

Learning more about commoning past and present helps us develop our own commoning projects, to deal more effectively with commoning pitfalls, and to make our efforts meaningfully anti-racist, anti-colonial, and inclusive. 

Commoning is life affirming, and spans everything from how we care for one another to working together, sustaining our communities, and, at times, defending what we hold dear.

Why commons?

Commons exist with their own internal challenges and, more significantly, in a dynamic relationship with capitalism and states. There are various perspectives on what commons mean, with some seeing them as a potential solution to issues in capitalism, while others might use the concept to justify privatization.

Our focus on commons arises from the realization that neither markets nor states can fully address the complex social and environmental challenges we currently face. We advocate for “nowtopias” — ongoing experiments in alternative ways of living and governing, providing spaces for envisioning and building futures beyond crises.

Given the pressing issues of our time, discussions and actions related to commons and commoning are likely to be crucial in addressing social conflicts throughout this century. It’s an important field of study and a practical area where everyone can play a role in ensuring positive change can take root.

Commoning is the ‘doing’ of our commons. 

Commoning, as a social process, is generative of relationships. It involves the ethics and practices of care, cooperative governance, value production, social reproduction and, sometimes, defence, that bind communities together.

Commoning creates commons – the spaces, places, ecologies, institutions, resources and forms of value that are created and maintained by communities in common.  

Commons are self-organising and self-governing social systems in which resources are shared by a community of users/producers, who also define the modes of use and production, distribution and circulation of these resources through democratic and horizontal forms of governance.

Commons are not utopias. They exist in a relationship of tension, both internal and, more significantly, vis-à-vis capital and states. In fact there are many alternative conceptualisations of commons – some complementary, others competing. Most starkly, for some thinkers, commons offer the promise of a ‘fix’ for capitalism. For others, the language of ‘the commons’ is used as a justification for ‘enclosing’ tangible or intangible resources through privatisation. For others, us included, commons – and commoning, the activity that sustains them – are the foundation of a post-capitalist future. 

We focus on commons because it is becoming increasingly clear that neither markets nor states are able to offer solutions to the cascade of intersecting social and environmental problems caused by the multiple crises we face today. We need ‘nowtopias’ – existing experiments in alternative ways of living and governing our affairs, everyday spaces for imagining and building futures beyond crises.  

In this context, debates and action around commons and commoning will likely be a key focus of social antagonism over this century and an important area of study and practice.

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