This is the second section of an essay, "Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions," by David Bollier and Natasha Hulst. The remaining three sections of the essay will be published in the remaining days of this week. The full essay can be downloaded as a PDF here.
2. Commoning as Relational Provisioning and Governance
Commoning plays a crucial role in the implementation of bioregional action – and relationalized finance – because it is a proven set of social practices and organizational forms for bringing people together into shared purpose. At their core, commons are vehicles for collaboration and peer governance that are capable of limiting or neutralizing capitalist domination and control. As described in Bollier and Helfrich’s book Free, Fair and Alive, there are recurrent patterns of commoning by which commoners successfully shape the terms of their own governance, provisioning, and allocation of benefits.[6]
Commons are not a new phenomenon; they have been a consistent, productive presence throughout history. Indeed, an estimated two billion people worldwide, operating outside of the market system without private property rights or money, meet their needs through commoning, according to the International Association for the Study of the Commons. This activity can be seen in commons for stewarding land, coastal fisheries, community forests, farmland, water systems, and regional food webs.
Commoning also manifests in a growing international Commonsverse of projects in diverse modern contexts. Urban commoners use public spaces and buildings, mutual aid networks, alternative currencies, peer-savings clubs, timebanking, and urban agriculture to meet needs. Digital commoners have developed a vast oeuvre of shareable software code, network infrastructures and protocols, Fab Labs and hackerspaces, platform cooperatives, shareable content using Creative Commons licenses, open-access scholarly journals and websites, and open educational resources (curricula, syllabi, videos). The practices of commoning can also be seen in co-operatives, informal care commons, co-housing, and arts and culture collaboratives.[7]
As a socio-economic-ecological form, commons are distinct from markets and state power in that they generally strive to:
▪ decommodify their shared infrastructures to prevent their sale or liquidation except under carefully controlled terms that protect the integrity of commoning;
▪ limit use and extraction to levels that can be sustained without depleting the shared wealth;
▪ address basic needs in fair, inclusive ways, which enables marginalized and disenfranchised groups to play more active roles in meeting their needs (and indeed, to have their needs met);
▪ allocate benefits based on needs, available supply, social equity, and long-term stability, not just based on market or subsidized price;
▪ carefully control interactions with markets to ensure that money and market culture don't undermine the social coherence and stability of a commons;
▪ peer govern participantsin fair-minded, participatory, and inclusive ways; and
▪ respect local landscapes and natural systems in the course of working with them.
These behaviors offer important support for a bioregional vision because they can enable fruitful, deferential relationships with living ecosystems. Unlike capitalist markets, commons don’t regard nature as separate from humans or as mere resources. They generally don't systemically externalize costs and risks onto nature and the community; they seek to internalize them in the course of provisioning needs. Commons don't treat people as rational, selfish creatures of the market, but as whole human beings with a range of material, social, emotional, ethical, and spiritual needs. In this respect, commoning is a force for social reconstruction and reconnection – a counterpoint to the social separation and transactionalism encouraged by markets.
Ultimately, commons reconceptualize the whole framework of production, moving it from markets into “new spaces of collective debate and shared purpose,” notes Stéphanie Leyronas of the French Development Agency (AFD), which is now pursuing a commons-based approach to development in Africa.[8] Commoning entails a shift “from efficiency logic to shared responsibility; form expertise to knowledge pluralism; from contracts to collective engagement; and from deliverables to long-term sharing.”[9] Precisely because it is so deeply relational and interdependent, commoning blends well with the deep interrelationality of flora, fauna, and other living beings in ecosystems.
Commons are no magic panacea – they may be plagued by sexist hierarchies, poor coordination and communication, leadership cliques, social fragmentation, etc. But their constitutive logics point in a very different direction than markets and state power. They strive to build cohorts of mutual care, trust, and group empowerment outside of the circuits of the money economy and bureaucratic systems. This capacity to foster bottom-up governance and provisioning is especially important in capitalist economies that use branded, proprietary products, oligopolistic, predatory markets, and consumer debt to engineer dependency and subordination. Now that the deficiencies of state regulation and “free markets” are quite clear, it is becoming clearer, too, that “only commoners can save the commons.” If commoners do not play leading roles in developing new types of bioregional regimes, the entrenched habits and pathologies of state power and capital interests will surely continue.
To orthodox economists disdainful of the cooperative ethos and unfamiliar with the actual range of real-life commons in the world, collaborative provisioning outside of markets and the sharing of benefits are seen as novel or fanciful aberrations. Indeed, it is a chestnut of the discipline that commons are failed management regimes known as “tragedies of the commons.” But, in fact, commoning is a serious, widespread, and often-effective way to meet needs consistently and fairly. In the face of capitalist economics and states intent on asserting their dominance and control, commoners have a mindset that is more expansive, experimental, self-reliant and localist than the market/state dares to imagine. They are less interested in organizing themselves into hierarchies to maximize productivity, revenue, and growth, and more interested in meeting their needs through convivial, agreed-upon collaborative practices with long-term stability. Whereas the market and state privilege the role of individual agency, private property rights, and contract freedom – vehicles of liberation for some, but certainly not most; vehicles for short-term profit but not so much for long-term sustainability – commoners tend to see wealth in much broader, holistic, nonmarket, and ecological terms.
Seen in its fullest perspective, the commons paradigm represents an "ontological shift" from the prevailing worldview of modern, capitalist life. Life is not seen as a competitive arena in which individuals strive to maximize their material self-interests. It is a committed community of shared purpose. It embraces a wide range of ecological, social, and ethical priorities. In this sense, commons are relational social organisms. This framing represents a profound shift of perspective away from that of the liberal-modernist-capitalist world, to one of dynamic, living entanglement with an animate Earth.[10] More: this framing moves well beyond a theory of new economic value and wealth-creation; it points to a deeper register altogether – a world of relational identity, social meaning, belonging, and quest for wholeness.[11]
NOTES
[6] David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (New Society Publishers, 2019), at https://freefairandalive.org.
[7] For an overview of the Commonsverse, see David Bollier, The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead (Schumacher Center for a New Economics, 2020), at https://commonerscatalog.org; and Bollier, Think Like a Commoner: A Brief Introduction to the Life of the Commons, Second Edition (New Society Publishers, 2025), at https://thinklikeacommoner.com.
[8] Stephanie Léyronas, Benjamin Coriat, et al., editors, The Commons: Drivers of Change and Opportunity in Africa (World Bank Publications, 2023).
[9] Stéphanie Leyronas, Research Office, French Development Agency, “From Silos to Cooperation: The Commons-based Approach at AFD,” UN FAO Science and Innovation Forum 2025, Rome, Octobert 15, 2025, at https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k15/k15vhmxbnp.
[10] See, e.g., Stephan Harding, Animate Earth, Second Edition (Green Books Ltd., 2006).
[11] This theme is brilliantly explored by Andreas Weber in Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology (Chelsea Green, 2014).
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