Commoning and Relational Approaches to Governance

Notes on a deep dive hosted by Zack Walsh and the Commons Strategies Group (Germany, 9-12, 2019) 

By Zack Walsh 

Our way of making sense of the world— our paradigm— shapes our ability to respond to crisis. Once a paradigm is established, it is extremely hard to think and behave outside its limits. The ecological crisis is a very intimate, as well as being a political and institutional crisis, because it calls on us to question the established paradigm within which society operates. It calls for a moment of deep liberation, liberating ourselves not only from unsustainable ways of being, but also from the old tools and languages that limit our responses. 

In this sense, the eco-crisis calls for a transformation at the deepest level—at the level of our way of making sense of the world. Ontology is the study of how we perceive the nature of being. Reading political and economic texts through ontological perspectives allows us to uncover the underlying hidden assumptions informing them. 

Different frameworks of governance presuppose different assumptions about reality (Stout and Love, 2019). Today’s mainstream political and economic discourses are increasingly sterile and unfit in large part because they are based on incorrect assumptions about the nature of being. The whole explanatory apparatus informing mainstream politics and economics is fundamentally Eurocentric and outdated, informed by centuries’ old science and philosophy. 

In this moment of crisis, rethinking governance requires more than re-thinking organizations, structures, and positions—it requires re-thinking the underlying belief systems, value systems, and ethics that inform them. We must re-examine our assumptions about humans and nonhumans, agency, rationality, and society. 

The commons 

This is especially true within the discourse on the commons. The logic of the commons is so different from liberal democracy and market capitalism that it is necessary to rethink the ontological premises informing it. Elinor Ostrom’s institutional analysis and development framework, for example, is the dominant approach to understanding the commons, yet it takes for granted many of the same foundational assumptions of standard political and economic thought. Shifting the paradigm within which we understand governance offers immense transformative potential.

 In their latest book, Free, Fair, and Alive (2019), the cofounders of the Commons Strategies Group, David Bollier and Silke Helfrich suggest that commons governance should be informed by an ontology that thinks fundamentally in terms of processes and relations, called process-relational ontology. Bollier and Helfrich use process-relational ontology to develop an alternative framework for exploring the commons across three inter-related dimensions— provisioning, peer governance, and social life. Across each of these dimensions, they coin new terms to describe patterns for enacting the commons which are vital, but which were largely missed or underexplored by mainstream governance frameworks, including the Ostrom framework. Making an OntoShift, or ontological shift, toward process-relational ontology helps provide a better apparatus for explaining the complexity and diversity of the commons and offers much greater potential to transform society via the logic of the commons. 

References 

David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, 2019, Free Fair and Alive: The insurgent power of the Commons. New Society Publishers, Canada. 

Margaret Stout & Jeannine, M. Love, 2019, Integrative governance: Generating sustainable responses to global crises. London, UK: Routledge. 

Website

 Keywords: ‘OntoShift’, commons, paradigm, Eurocentric, humans and nonhumans, capitalism, process-relational ontology. Wellbeing economy links: the commons, ontology, market capitalism, liberal dem