THE (UNSEEN) POWER OF THE COMMONS IN REINVENTING DEMOCRACY

Liberal democracy is under pressure from many quarters: accelerating climate change, deepening inequality, the resurgence of authoritarianism, artificial intelligence developed without proper public oversight, a growing willingness on the part of states to go to war, and dwindling public trust in the way markets and states share power. But treating the crisis of democracy as a political problem of weakening institutions in need of reform will not help us tackle all these interrelated crises. The question is not only whether democratic institutions can adapt and cope, but whether some of the assumptions underpinning our Western liberal institutions are part of the problem.

Commons have been a quiet success story of the 21st century. They have emerged in fields as varied as energy and sustainable food, urban planning, flood protection, the fight against poverty, social care, public transport and banking. These citizen-led initiatives reliably provide services, and they do so by involving the people who use them. In this sense, the commons are schools of democracy. Yet even if there is a successful commons in your town or region, you may never have heard of it. Official politics and the news media rarely take an interest, as they remain focused on what happens in the national centres of power. Nevertheless, the values and practices of the commons invite us to rethink democracy as something closer to people’s lives: more local, more relational and rooted in care.

Commons activist and scholar David Bollier and democracy researcher Sonia Bussu talk to policy scholar Hendrik Wagenaar about what we can learn from the commons – where communities have long developed their own ways of governing and producing – and how these can help us renew our democratic system.

Panel:

Sonia Bussu is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Birmingham, where she studies how citizens, particularly those on the margins of political life, can be involved in shaping the policies that affect them. She is the editor (with Adrian Bua) of Reclaiming Participatory Governance: Social Movements and the Reinvention of Democratic Innovations (2023). She has also published extensively on participatory governance and local democracy, including work on Barcelona; she leads INSPIRE, a Horizon Europe project on democratic innovations; and Mindset Revolutions, a project designed to develop processes that keep young people at the heart of mental health policy-making.
David Bollier is Director of the Reinventing the Commons Programme at the Schumacher Centre for a New Economics and co-founder of the Commons Strategies Group, an international advocacy project. He is one of the leading interpreters of the commons as a new paradigm for economics, politics and culture, and the author or editor of around ten books on the subject, including Think Like a Commoner (2014), Patterns of Commoning and The Wealth of the Commons (both co-edited with Silke Helfrich), and, with Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (2019). He writes the blog Bollier.org and hosts the podcast *Frontiers of Commoning*.

Moderation
Hendrik Wagenaar He is a fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity at the University of Vienna, and an adjunct professor at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy at the University of Canberra. His publications focus on participatory democracy, interpretive policy analysis and practice theory. He is the author (with Barbara Prainsack) of *The Pandemic Within: Policy Making for a Better World* (Policy Press, 2021). He has written several award-winning articles on practice theory and citizen participation. His current research focuses on practice theory, democratic theory, the commons, and deliberative policy analysis