THE (UNSEEN) POWER OF THE COMMONS IN REINVENTING DEMOCRACY

Liberal democracy is under pressure from many sides: accelerating climate change, deepening inequality, the return of authoritarianism, artificial intelligence developed without proper public oversight, a growing readiness of states to go to war, and shrinking public trust in the way markets and states share power. But treating the crisis of democracy as a political problem of weakening institutions that need reforming will not help us address all these inter-related crises.  The question is not only whether democratic institutions can adapt and cope, but whether some of the assumptions behind 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, fighting 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, 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. Still, the values and practices of the commons invite us to rethink democracy as something closer to people’s lives: more local, more relational and grounded in care.

Commons activist and scholar David Bollier and democracy researcher Sonia Bussu talk with 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 house.

Panel:

Sonia Bussu is Associate Professor in Public Policy at the University of Birmingham, where she studies how citizens, especially those at the margins of political life, can be involved in making the policies that affect them. She is editor (with Adrian Bua) of Reclaiming Participatory Governance: Social Movements and the Reinvention of Democratic Innovations (2023). She has also published widely on participatory governance and local democracy, including work on Barcelona, leads INSPIRE, a Horizon Europe project on democratic innovations, and Mindset Revolutions, a project to designs processes that keep young people at the center of mental health policy making.
David Bollier is Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center 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 is fellow at the Center for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity at the University of Vienna, and adjunct professor at the Center for Deliberative Democracy at the University of Canberra. He publishes in the areas of participatory democracy, interpretive policy analysis, and practice theory. He is author (with Barbara. Prainsack) of The Pandemic Within: Policy Making for a Better World (Policy Press, 2021). He wrote several award-winning articles on practice theory and on citizen participation. His current research centers on practice theory, democratic theory, commons, and deliberative policy analysis