ABSTRACT

Bollier argues that the commons paradigm offers a refreshing and practical lens for re-imagining politics, governance, and law. The commons is about self-organized social systems, which emerge for stewardship of shared wealth and are highly generative. This is seen in the successful self-management of forests, farmland, and water, in open source software communities, and in open-access scholarly journals. A new socio-political imaginary is needed that goes beyond mainstream ideological debates that continue to dominate public discourse. The 2008 financial crisis offered a critique of the many consensus myths that have kept the economy’s neoliberal capitalist narrative afloat. System-change movements with generative capacities of decentralized, self-organized networks eschew the conventional policy and political process and instead seek change through self-organized emergence. The system that emerges always possesses greater power and influence than is possible through planned, incremental change. New governance and provisioning arrangements can rise, transform, or replace predatory markets and capitalism. New post-capitalist ways of talking about provisioning models and peer governance are now emerging. Bollier imagines influencing unfolding realities that are less about electing different leaders and policies than about learning how to orchestrate new shared intentionality and hoist up new narratives about the commons.