The Wealth of the Commons · A World Beyond Market and State

We are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, people around the world are searching for alternatives. The Wealth of the Commons explains how millions of commoners have organized to defend their forests and fisheries, reinvent local food systems, organize productive online communities, reclaim public spaces, improve environmental stewardship and re-imagine the very meaning of “progress” and governance. In short, how they’ve built their commons.

In 73 timely essays by a remarkable international roster of activists, academics and project leaders, this book chronicles ongoing struggles against the private com¬moditization of shared resources – often known as market enclosures – while documenting the immense generative power of the commons. The Wealth of the Commons is about history, political change, public policy and cultural transformation on a global scale – but most of all, it’s about individual commoners taking charge of their lives and their endangered resources.

David Bollier is an American author, activist and independent scholar who has studied the commons for fifteen years and blogs at [www.bollier.org](http://www.bollier.org).

Silke Helfrich is a German author and independent activist of the commons who blogs at [www.commonsblog.de](http://www.commonsblog.de). Bollier and Helfrich co-founded the Commons Strategies Group in 2010 with Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives.

See more on this work at:

[www.wealthofthecommons.org](http://www.wealthofthecommons.org)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction, by David Bollier & Silke Helfrich

Part I: The Commons as a New Paradigm

•My Rocky Road to the Commons, by Jacques Paysan

•The Economy of Wastefulness: The Biology of the Commons, by Andreas Weber

•We Are Not Born as Egoists, by Friederike Habermann

•Resilience Thinking, by Rob Hopkins

•Institutions and Trust in Commons: Dealing with Social Dilemmas, by Martin Beckenkamp

•The Structural Communality of the Commons, by Stefan Meretz

•The Logic of the Commons and the Market: A Shorthand Comparison of Their Core Beliefs, by Silke Helfrich

•First Thoughts for a Phenomenology of the Commons, by Ugo Mattei

•Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, by Silvia Federici

•Rethinking the Social Welfare State in Light of the Commons, by Brigitte Kratzwald

•Common Goods Don’t Simply Exist – They Are Created, by Silke Helfrich

•The Tragedy of the Anticommons, by Michael Heller

•Why Distinguish Common Goods from Public Goods?, by James B. Quilligan

•Subsistence: Perspective for a Society Based on Commons, by Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen

•Technology and the Commons, by Josh Tenenberg

•The Commoning of Patterns and the Patterns of Commoning, by Franz Nahrada

•The Abundance of the Commons, A Conversation with Brian Davey, Roberto Verzola and Wolfgang Hoeschele

Part II: Capitalism, Enclosure and Resistance

•Enclosures from the Bottom Up, by Peter Linebaugh

•The Commons: A Historical Concept of Property Rights, by Hartmut Zückert

•The Global Land Grab: The New Enclosures, by Liz Alden Wily

•Genetically Engineered Promises & Farming Realities, by P.V. Satheesh

•The Coming Financial Enclosure of the Common, by Antonio Tricarico

•Mining as a Threat to the Commons: The Case of South America, by César Padilla

•Water as a Commons: Only Fundamental Change Can Save Us, by Maude Barlow

•Dam Building: Who’s “Backward” – Subsistence Cultures or Modern “Development”?, by Vinod Raina

•Belo Monte, or the Destruction of the Commons, by Gerhard Dilger

•Subtle But Effective: Modern Forms of Enclosure, by Hervé Le Crosnier

•Good Bye Night Sky, by Jonathan Rowe

•Crises, Capitalism and Cooperation: Does Capital Need a Commons Fix?, by Massimo De Angelis

•Hope from the Margins, by Gustavo Esteva

•A New German Raw Materials Strategy: A Modern Enclosure of the Commons?, by Lili Fuhr

•Using “Protected Natural Areas” to Appropriate the Commons, by Ana de Ita

•Intellectual Property Rights and Free Trade Agreements: A Never-Ending Story, by Beatriz Busaniche

•Global Enclosures in the Service of Empire, by David Bollier

Part III: Commoning – A Social Innovation for Our Times

•School of Commoning, by George Pór

•Practicing Commons in Community Gardens: Urban Gardening as a Corrective for Homo Economicus, by Christa Müller

•Mundraub.org: Sharing Our Common Fruit, by Katharina Frosch

•Living in “The Garden of Life”, by Margrit Kennedy and Declan Kennedy

•Reclaiming the Credit Commons: Towards a Butterfly Society, by Thomas H. Greco, Jr.

•Shared Space: A Space Shared is a Space Doubled, by Sabine Lutz

•Transition Towns: Initiatives of Transformation, by Gerd Wessling

•Learning from Minamata: Creating High-Level Well-Being in Local Communities in Japan, by Takayoshi Kusago

•Share or Die – A Challenge for Our Times, by Neal Gorenflo

•The Faxinal: A Brazilian Experience of the Commons and Its Relationship with the State, by Mayra Lafoz Bertussi

•Capable Leadership, Institutional Skills and Resource Abundance Behind Flourishing Coastal Marine Commons in Chile, by Gloria L. Gallardo Fernández & Eva Friman

•Community Based Forest and Livelihood Management in Nepal, by Shrikrishna Upadhyay

•Salt and Trade at the Pink Lake: Community Subsistence in Senegal, by Papa Sow & Elina Marmer

•El Buen Vivir and the Commons, A Conversation between Gustavo Soto Santiesteban and Silke Helfrich

Part IV: Knowledge Commons for Social Change

•The Code is the Seed of the Software, An Interview with Adriana Sánchez

•The Boom of Commons-Based Peer Production, by Christian Siefkes

•Copyright and Fairy Tales, by Carolina Botero and Julio César Gaitán

•Creative Commons: Governing the Intellectual Commons from Below, by Mike Linksvayer

•Freedom for Users, Not for Software, by Benjamin Mako Hill

•Public Administration Needs Free Software, by Federico Heinz

•From Blue Collar to Open Commons Region: How Linz, Austria, Has Benefited from Committing to the Commons, by Thomas Gegenhuber, Naumi Haque and Stefan Pawel

•Emancipating Innovation Enclosures: The Global Innovation Commons, by David E. Martin

•Move Commons: Labeling, Opening and Connecting Social Initiatives, by Javier de la Cueva, Bastien Guerry, Samer Hassan, Vicente J. Ruiz Jurado

•Peer-to-Peer Economy and New Civilization Centered Around the Sustenance of the Commons, by Michel Bauwens and Franco Iacomella

•Knowledge is the Water of the Mind: How to Structure Rights in “Immaterial Commons”, by Rainer Kuhlen

Part V: Envisioning a Commons-Based Policy and Production Framework

•Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Commons, by David Bollier and Burns H. Weston

•The Common Heritage of Mankind: A Bold Doctrine Kept Within Strict Boundaries, by Prue Taylor

•Ideas for Change: Making Meaning Out of Economic and Institutional Diversity, by Ryan T. Conway

•Constructing Commons in the Cultural Environment, by Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann and Katherine J. Strandburg

•The Triune Peer Governance of the Digital Commons, by Michel Bauwens

•Multilevel Governance and Cross-Scale Coordination for Natural Resource Management: Lessons from Current Research, by Helen Markelova and Esther Mwangi

•The Atmosphere as a Global Commons, by Ottmar Edenhofer, Christian Flachsland and Bernhard Lorentz

•Transforming Global Resources into Commons, by Gerhard Scherhorn

•Electricity Commons – Toward a New Industrial Society, by Julio Lambing

•The Failure of Land Privatization: On the Need for New Development Policies, by Dirk Löhr

•The Yasuní-ITT Initiative, or The Complex Construction of Utopia, by Alberto Acosta

•Equitable Licensing – Ensuring Access to Innovation, by Christina Godt, Christian Wagner-Ahlfs and Peter Tinnemann

•P2P-Urbanism: Backed by Evidence, by Nikos A. Salingaros and Federico Mena-Quintero

Epilogue

Index