Category:Commons Transition

This Commons Transition category relates to projects that are specifically or more loosely related to a commons-oriented transition for our political economy, society, and civilizational model.

Key Quotes

"The commons are in the midst of a “double transition,”. On the one hand, the resources at stake are often abundant and immaterial—think personal data generated by social media networks or activity sensors—as opposed to scarce and material—like water and grazing land."

- Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico [1]

"Antonios Broumas (2017) developed a typology of commons theory to differentiate between social democratic and critical theories of the intellectual commons. His analysis may also be mapped onto the digital commons. According to Broumas, social democratic theories of the commons “employ political economic methodologies to analyse the dynamics that unfold between the commons, the market and the state with the aim to propose reconfigurations of these relations which will best serve social welfare” (Ibid., 103). Such theorists argue that by making progressive changes to existing structures, we can bring about a more just and egalitarian society. As it concerns the digital commons, the goal is to build repositories and platforms for commons-based knowledge and peer-to-peer production that can, in turn, bring about greater degrees of personal freedom as well as democratic decision-making (Bauwens 2005; Benkler 2006)."

- Benjamin J. Birkinbine [2]

Key Concepts of This Category

How can we transition from a society centered around the capitalist market, to a society that would be commons centric ?

• What kind of economics would govern such a new political economy ? See: Category: Commons Economics

• What kind of socio-technical infrastructures would we need to strenghten for such a transition? See: Category: Commons Infrastructure

• What kind of policy proposals can bring about or hasten such a transition. See: Category: Commons Policy

Useful learning resources

Introductory

• The Commons Transition Primer is a home page linking both to introductory and to deeper articles.

• Commons Transition Stories contains a selection of featured essays, interviews and texts on Commons Transition projects and related initiatives, many of them suitable for general introductory reading.

More resources are linked from the Commons Transition summary page (which used to serve as this category page).

Deeper Study

• The Commons Transition Wiki is a repository for policy papers and proposals related to Commons Transition.

• Mutation of Economics into the Fifth Integral-Arational Structure of Consciousness

• One transition, many transitions? A corpus-based study of societal sustainability transition discourses in four civil society’s proposals

P2P Foundation Material

• The Commons Transition Plan is based on the FLOK Society Project in Ecuador around 2014. It deals with the setting up of commons of knowledge for all sectors of activity in society.
  • The Commons Transition Plan in the Commons Transition Website

• The second important document is focusing on urban commons, which are at this stage, mostly about mutualizing the distribution of provisioning systems through shared resources. See our report: CHANGING SOCIETIES THROUGH URBAN COMMONS TRANSITIONS, also called the Commons Transition Plan for the City of Ghent. See the original Dutch-language report; also available in a [ English translation]

• Our third important report examines the socio-technical infrastructures, at cosmo-local scale, needed for this transition in our productive and (pre)distributive systems. See: P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival: Towards a P2P Infrastructure for a Socially Just Circular Society. By Michel Bauwens and Alex Pazaitis. Foreword by Kate Raworth. P2P Foundation, June 2019.

Related Categories

• Category: Commons is a broader category dealing with the Commons more generally, and in principle.
• Category: P2P Transition is an overlapping smaller category, relating to similar issues, more from the perspective of process (P2P) rather than substance (Commons).