What
a pleasant surprise to learn that some people at the United Nations –
specifically, its Inter-Parliamentary Union – want to know more about
how commons might be relevant to the “multilateral system” of
international governance and assistance.   

I was happy to oblige by participating on a conference panel last Friday, February 22, called “The
Multilateral System in the Public Eye: The Impact of Mass
Communications.” (The conference itself was entitled “Emerging
Challenges to Multilateralism: A Parliamentary Response.”)

This panel focused
on the ways in which new communications media, especially the Internet,
are affecting the effectiveness, credibility, and reputation of
multilateral institutions such as the UN. The clear takeaway that I took
from the conference is that certain players within UN are openly
worried about the ability of multilateral institutions to solve the
urgent problems of our time.

That’s a legitimate concern. As
countless problems pummel the world order – climate change, inequality,
cyber-warfare, data surveillance, the list goes on – the UN is an
obvious forum in which to discuss issues. But with limited authority to
solve problems and unwieldy internal governance structures and
processes, no one expects bold, timely action. Yet the rise of
participatory online media is showcasing the limits of the UN. Hence the open hand-wringing.
 

I
was pleased to learn that there is at least a glimmer of interest in
commoning as an appealing option. Regrettably, my sense is that UN
discussants are not prepared to explore the commons very deeply or
seriously. This is not entirely surprising. Most participants in UN
deliberations, after all, are representatives of their national
government and are immersed in the bubble of state power and
conventional politics. There is a general conceit that policy,
legislation, and other top-down actions are the most meaningful and
effective ways for dealing with problems.

They’re not, of course. There
are other important approaches. Many centralized state and multilateral
structures are themselves part of the problem. They tend to consolidate
power too much, inviting political gamesmanship, media optics, and
corruption at the expense of substantive on-the-ground results. They
privilege capital-friendly “market solutions” at the expense of socially
minded, creative innovation from the bottom-up. For their part, state
bureaucracies often feel threatened by stable, locally grounded commons
that assert their own interests and self-sufficiency. And so on.  

Below are my prepared comments for the panel, which a presented were abbreviated to accommodate the five-minute limit for each speaker. A video of the panel can be found here. My presentation is at the timemark 11:50 through 16:40.

Multilateralism and the Commons

It wasn’t so
long ago that nation-states strictly controlled the types of news,
information, and culture that citizens could see and hear. While certain
authoritarian regimes still tightly control domestic communications –
notwithstanding the Internet – the interconnected global village that
Marshall McLuhan predicted in the 1960s is well upon us. Cheap and easy
transnational communications is the norm for a great many of the world’s
people. Communications from other cultures and countries routinely
influence our everyday lives.

It’s not just
that people can hear or see unauthorized, novel, and foreign
information, however. It’s that they can now generate their own news,
videos, and podcasts. They can write their own software code, develop
their own wikis, and start new movements with modest resources.

This is
enabling people to assert moral and political claims to global audiences
that was previously impossible – and that traditional state and media
authorities cannot control. Distributed media technologies have
essentially changed the political and cultural ecosystems of individual
nations and global culture, often in profound ways.

Naturally,
nation-states and multilateral institutions tend to find these
developments disorienting and troubling. They may still be able to
assert their authority, sometimes with sufficient coercive power to
enforce their will. But the legality they invoke is not necessarily the same thing as perceived legitimacy.
The latter is more of an open question – a question that national
governments may try to influence, but which ultimately only the
citizenry can address.

This tension
is not going to go away. It is now baked into the very structures of
modern telecommunications, the economy, and politics. Indeed, the Trump
Administration is largely based on exploiting the tension between new
media and legacy state institutions.

I characterize
the problem as a deep structural conflict between the centralized,
hierarchical, expert-driven institutions of a prior era – and the
bottom-up, self-organized, participatory communities made possible by
open networks and various apps. The very ideas of centralized state
power and shared national identity are under siege when everyone can
easily create a diversity of new publics and subcultures on their own
terms.

While social
media have plenty of proven dangers – fake news, Facebook algorithms,
venues for authoritarian populism and hate – let’s remember that open
networks – especially when organize as commons – hold some fairly
significant creative, productive, and democratic powers. For me, the
question is whether state power and multilateral institutions are
capable of recognizing and supporting these constructive powers of the
commons.

As an activist
and policy strategist, I have been studying and working with commons
around the world for the past twenty years. I’m not talking about the
“tragedy of the commons” that Garrett Hardin made famous in his 1968
essay immortalizing that phrase. Contrary to Hardins claims, a commons
does not consist of unowned resources. It is not a free-for-all in which
you can take as much as you want.

A commons is a
self-organized social system for the stewardship of shared wealth over
the long term. It’s a distinctly different form of governance and
provisioning than either the market or state. Commoners devise their own
rules, social practices, traditions, and rituals that are suited for
their particular context and culture. They self-monitor for free-riders
and they impose punishments on those who violate the rules.

The commons is
not just small bodies of natural resources such as farmland, fisheries,
forests, and irrigation water, as studied by the late Elinor Ostrom,
who won the Nobel Prize for her work in 2009. The commons also consists
of shared management of systems in higher education, in cities, in
diverse social settings, and in digital spaces. 

Commons are
especially robust in the world of free and open source software and
Wikipedia; open access journals that are making science and scholarly
accessible to everyone; open educational resources that are making
textbooks and curricula more affordable to students; and Creative
Commons-licensed sharing of everything, bypassing the monopoly rents
imposed by the intellectual property industries. 

There are many
other commons to which I will turn to in a moment. But my basic point
is that commons are generative and value-creating, not a “tragedy.” And
they are huge potential partners for state and multilateral
institutions, if the latter can understand commoning properly.

If we want a
world of greater inclusion and participation, and greater freedom in
both a political and consumer sense, then we need to be talking about
the commons. It is worth remembering Hannah Arendt’s concept of power.
She wrote in her book The Human Condition that power is something that “springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.”

In other
words, power does not inhere in our institutions themselves. It must be
constantly created and re-created constantly, socially. In this respect,
many state and multilateral institutions are losing their struggles to
retain power and perceived legitimacy. They are not offering credible,
effective responses to urgent societal needs. I’d like to suggest that
state institutions would do well to enter into partnerships with various
commons to:

1) leverage the generative, creative power that commons can offer; 2) empower
peer governance and responsibility among people in ways that can nourish
wholesome participation and, indirectly, state legitimacy; and 3) support locally appropriate, stable, self-supporting solutions that affected people can create themselves; and4) enable transboundary cooperation on ecological problems.

In other
words, state and multilateral institutions need to see the challenge of
social media in a much bigger context. It’s not just about clever
messaging and better tweets. It’s about developing a deeper modus vivendi
with the largely unrecognized power of the commons. This, in fact, is
what the French Development Agency has been doing recently as it
explores how commons could enhance its development strategies in Africa
and other Francophone countries.

So imagine an expansion the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative,
DNDi, which is a partnership among commons, state institutions, and
private companies to reduce the costs of drug R&D and distribution.
DNDi releases medically important drugs under royalty-free,
non-exclusive licenses so that benefits so that the drugs can be made
available everywhere inexpensively.

Or imagine how the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team has
helped various states in the wake of natural disasters, such as the
earthquake in Haiti. HOT brings together volunteer hackers to produce
invaluable Web maps showing first-responders and victims where to find
hospitals, water, and other necessities. This is a notable
commons-driven solution, not a bureaucratic one.

The System of Rice Intensification
is a global open-source community that trades advice and knowledge
about the agronomy of growing rice. Working totally outside of
conventional multilateral channels, SRI has brought together farmers in
Sri Lanka and Cuba, India and Indonesia, to improve their rice yields by
two or three-fold.

We should think about how Community Land Trusts are decommodifying land and making them more available to ordinary people. Let’s consider the Open Prosthetics Project that is producing affordable, license-free prosthetics….and cosmo-local production
that shares knowledge and design globally, open-source style, while
producing physical things (farm equipment, furniture, housing) locally. 

The King of the Meadows
project in the Netherlands is a commons that has mobilized citizens to
steward biodiversity connected with cultural heritage. The Bangla-Pesa
is a neighborhood currency in Kenya that is helping people exchange
value and meet needs without the use of the national fiat currency. 

I think you get the idea. If multilateral institutions are going to adjust to the new world unleashed by distributed apps and digital technologies, they should begin by exploring the great promise of commons in meeting urgent needs, giving people some genuine control over their lives, and compensating for the inherent limits of bureaucratic state systems and markets.

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