Commons

Up to 4.000 potato varieties are growing in Peru in a high-altitude Sacred Valley of the Incas. Six Quechua communities have been able to maintain the integrity of their biocultural traditions and fragile ecosystem.

What if a poorer community created its own currency to foster social exchange? We interviewed Ruddick, the founder of the Bangla-Pesa to learn more about his remarkable experiment in community-based money.

In 2011, a community of farmers, designers, developers, engineers, architects, roboticists and open source thinkers came together in Boston, Massachusetts, to explore a simple yet radical idea – that great improvements in agriculture could be achieved by reducing barriers to knowledge exchange.

Cecosesola is a network of about sixty cooperatives and grassroots organizations in Venezuela, with about 20,000 members. The cooperatives sell at weekly markets and provide community-backed loans, among many other services.

Making commons come alive again in everyday life seems like a revolution that can be interpreted through two lenses. Is it a rediscovery of precapitalist and prestate organizational principles or is it a break with the current political order?

In 2005 Black shack revolted because they felt betrayed by the government. After that they started to organize their protest. Their demand for recognition goes beyond the liberal tradition of “inclusion” in a political or legal system.

Civilization can't affort to lose archives and libraries. Free, unrestricted digital access is the key, and the creativity and action of citizens is what turns it in the lock. From the book "Patterns of Commoning"

Andrea J. Nightingale points out that emotional attach­ments to land, seascape and community can help subjectivities to foster successful commoning.

Nichlagarh, an adivasi village in the forest region of Southern Rajasthan, is caught between the bureaucratic regime of the Forestry Department (FD) of India and progressive legislation that claims to restore the traditional rights of commoners.

Some countries, as Vietnam, fear it, others, like Thailand, have high hopes - what can be expected of ASEAN's neo-liberal project? About its future perspectives and an alternative vision.

David Bollier and Michel Bauwens of the Commons Strategies Group/P2P Foundation discussed the role of the commons and peer to peer production in meeting people’s needs and the many enclosures of the commons that are abridging their fundamental rights.

The coming set of Sustainable Development Goals will seek to protect ecosystems, conserve resources, and, as with the Millennium Development Goals, lift millions of people out of poverty. Now that solid legal ground must be developed further.

The conference “Legal Remedies for Resource Equity”, whick took place on September 15th, focused on the use of environmental law to prevent the negative impacts of global resource extraction. A documentation of Barbara Unmüßig's keynote and presentations of the speaker's corners.

Oceans have always played a key role for life on earth. In his lecture, marine conservation biologist and author Callum Roberts (University of York, England), describes the distressing dimension that the relatively short human rule of the seas has reached throughout the past decade.

Is our economy essentially wrong? It beliefs in abundant material resources and meanwhile infinite immaterial resources like knowledge and design are maintained artifically scarce, but there is an alternative.

Even if the commons economies cannot provide an answer to each and every question today, one thing is certain: they are emerging in practice in diverse forms all over the world. And: their growth is unstoppable!

Keynote "New Infrastructures for Commoning by Design" (Miguel Said Vieira ) - Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Watch on YouTube This external content requires your consent. Please note our privacy policy.

Opening speech by Barbara Unmüßig - Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Watch on YouTube This external content requires your consent. Please note our privacy policy.

A Keynote by Daniela Gottschlich.