Sub-theme 10. Local institution building and radical futures for the commons
Panel 10.4.
Understanding the contribution of commons institutions to decommodification and postgrowth
Growing resource consumption and increasing spatial inequalities in both the Global North and the Global South pose urgent socio-ecological challenges to sustainability. This panel analyzes how the collectives in charge of commons can mitigate the challenges of overconsumption and inequality through decommodification strategies.
Commons are self-governed by a group of users, which (a) produces institutional rules supporting common ownership, collective decision-making and shared responsibilities, and (b) promotes social practices leading to a sense of community (e.g., sense of belonging, commitment, identity), as prerequisites for (c) the decommodification of human-nature interactions.
In this panel we opt for a strong definition of sustainability that recognizes the potential contradictions between infinite economic growth and planetary limits. The rules of the game that emerge in the collectives in charge of a commons can potentially provide long-term solutions for sustainable resource governance beyond a simplistic state-market dichotomy. We will go a step further and examine if self-declared collectives may even be forms of social-economic organizations that can make transformations toward a postgrowth organization of society socially, ecologically, and economically equitable. If self-declared collectives are able to create “islands of decommodification” in urban or rural landscapes otherwise dominated by profit-seeking behaviors, highlighting underlying mechanisms will provide an empirically-grounded contribution to debates on postgrowth organization of societies.
This panel aims at exploring the nexus commonification/ decommodification on the basis of empirical studies that demonstrate conditions of success and failure regarding transition pathways for a postgrowth society.
1. Urban commons at the commonification / decommodification nexus – which contribution to a post-growth organization of society?
Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Switzerland
Urban commons are said to provide viable alternatives to for-profit forms of organization. This presentation explores the mechanisms through which this can happen using a political ecology and institutionalist approach. More precisely, we focus on how commonification can lead to decommodification of urban resources. Suppose this causal relationship can be demonstrated, both conceptually and empirically. In that case, we can go a step further and ask whether commons can provide real-life examples of a post-growth organization of society.
We proceed in three steps. First, we develop working definitions of commonification and decommodification. Second, we discuss the links between both processes, focusing on an institutional analysis of urban commons and discourses developed by the commoners who use urban resources. Third, we discuss whether commons can be analyzed as stepping-stones to post-growth forms of social-political organization.
We base this discussion on the empirical results of a large research project entitled CommonPaths (commonpaths.unibe.ch), which compares urban commons in Switzerland and Ghana.
2. A conceptual step towards “commoning care” as a pathway for urban postgrowth
University of Bern, Switzerland
Feminist political economy has demonstrated the role of social reproduction as a noneconomic precondition to maintain capitalist growth. Combined with the solid global ageing trends, how to meet the increasing societal need for care sits at the core of “crisis of care” discussions. This paper develops a conceptual framework that brings a resource-based approach to commons in dialogue with feminist social reproduction research and planning to explore the potential of commoning care as a transition pathway for postgrowth city. This framework helps to identify public policy interventions and strategies needed to claim and maintain care as urban commons. The paper develops two postulates: First, care is a meta-resource that makes other essential resources (i.e., food, shelter, safety) available and accessible to maintain life daily and intergenerationally. Second, constructing care as an urban commons ensures socially and economically equitable access to this essential resource. We build on existing definitions of care from feminist economics, critical geography, political philosophy, and resource-based approach to commons to substantiate these conceptual propositions. Moreover, we incorporate the theoretical insights from the social reproduction theory to understand better the “urban” as the scene for using and maintaining care as a sustainable resource. Finally, the paper applies this framework to the elderly care regime in Switzerland by drawing on examples from three municipalities in the canton of Bern to demonstrate the institutions and the actors involved in an enclosure of elderly care through commodification and privatization at the intersection of land use planning and social policy.
3. Sustainability in food systems: Challenges in de-commodifying production and distribution illustrated by the food commons CampiAperti, Bologna, Italy
Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Italy
Following the definition of sustainability in agroecological food systems (Gliessman 2015), a social, cultural and economic paradigm shift is needed to alter consumers and small producers’ dependency to big capital both in production and distribution systems. In participating at the dominant market, producers have to align to a standardised production, maximise their production and to be flexible to market demands. This implies that the type of inputs, methods, and practices in production are specified by agri-business and controlled by state agencies, and not by producers themselves. These three challenges are confronted by my example CampiAperti, who initiated a de-commodification process through the practice of commoning.
Commoning is the continuous activity and daily engagement of making and re-making the commons through shared practices (Federici 2019). My paper will show that small producers’ autonomy together with self-governing markets by groups of self-producers and consumers are two complementary dimensions for reaching sustainable food systems. Farmers’ aim for controlling one’s own resources is linked with the development of a specific craft (cheese, bread, etc.), enabling them to control all the stages of production. Autonomous farmers rely on their established co-created reciprocal relations with other farmers, consumers and local social movements for creating self-governed markets to protect their sustainable food production systems. For farmers to earn a living, the competitive relations amongst farmers is regulated collectively with a collaborative price-mechanism setting, while part of the income is re-used for expanding their autonomy from the capitalist market. The paper concludes with demonstrating the tension with the state by this food commons.
4. Land-based transformative justice – returning to the commons after incarceration.
District Commons, USA
Here we introduce a case study of an urban commons community project in San Francisco, California, centered around the needs and wisdoms of the formerly incarcerated community. This intentional community is home to five individuals, and serves as two community spaces that operate as commons-based educational spaces. The formerly incarcerated individuals in this home have collectively served over sixty years incarcerated, each having served life sentences in California’s prisons.The ethos behind these spaces was to forge a re-entry experience that provided the option for returned individuals to join a commons-based community, as opposed to a capitalist based society. Here we describe emergent social dynamics that transcends capitalist logics and instead centers on commons based economic logics. This project has revealed the embodied and lived experience of becoming a commoner after incarceration, and documents how attitudes of reuse, repurposing, stewardship and transformation has been organically deployed to humans, of resources and labour – that is, throw no one and nothing away if it can be avoided. We describe the role of land-based transformative justice in contributing to commons based urban endeavors and discuss this praxis in relation to the commons circuit as described by De Angelis.
