David Bollier - The Commons as a New/Old Paradigm of Governance, Policy, and Political Action

There is increasing global interest in the current discourse of "the Commons" as a paradigm of governance shared by an entire community. While at the American Academy as a Bosch Public Policy fellow in fall 2012, David A. Bollier, founder of the Commons Strategies Group, aimed to produce a strategy memorandum as a foundation for further discussion, planning, and action in the commons world.

His December 4 lecture spoke to the continuing and even advancing appeal of the Commons, which stems, he says, both from an insightful and sustained critique of neoliberal economics and policy, as well as from its practical systems for managing value. Eschewing homo economicus, the standard economic model of human behavior - and the basis of the capitalist ethos - the Commons, Bollier says, draws upon understandings of human action that also encompass our capacities for cooperation and collaboration.

The result has been a recent explosion of innovative commons-based projects, such as free and open source software, the re-localization of food, collaborative consumption, open-access publishing, and alternative currencies. Bollier's lecture concentrates on the global Commons movement as a federated, transnational "movement of movements" that aims to overcome the limitations of centralized institutions and markets in favor of commons-based models.