Towards public-commons partnerships?
The organizational system known as "the commons" was frequent in Europe before the Industrial Revolution. Our current economic model, based on the extension of private ownership in tandem with public ownership, has brought about the disappearance of the commons, and with them the means of protecting environmental resources by communities. The current difficulty in establishing effective governance to consider essential public goods such as climate or air quality is a glaring illustration of this.
Valérie Peugeot, a researcher at Orange Lab and president of the Vecam association, believes that a fundamental challenge is now to open up a third way: letting the public, the private and the commons coexist: "With the commons, we have a kind of political breach that allows us to conceive the world other than as a binary vision between public and market".
The community, which leads project governance, has a fundamental role and the researcher recommends the development of PCPs, or "public-commons partnerships".
"With the commons, we can see a whole series of large and small, local or international communities setting up to meet the problems of the world by self-organizing, by establishing governance rules and by sharing resources".
For example, to produce renewable energy, we will create "new commons" by legally dissociating solar roofs from buildings in order to rent them out, or by co-investing through participatory finance. Public-private arrangements eventually get close to the concept of PCP (1). These PCPs can also take the form of SCICs (co-operative companies of collective interest) as is increasingly seen in circular economy projects.
In order to find one's way around this new field, good governance rules (2) for commons by local communities, laid down by Elinor Ostrom on the basis of her long empirical studies, may be of great use.
About VECAM:
Vecam arose from the awareness that information, cultural output and knowledge are undergoing increasing digitization in our societies. It seeks to give citizens the means to question, understand and take ownership of these transformations. Vecam is behind the "Réseau francophone autour des communs (French-speaking network about the commons)" and the Le temps des communs festival.
www.vecam.org
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1.Watch the video "Les communs ouvrent une brèche politique entre public et marché (The commons open a political breach between public and market) "
2.Read the article "Les Communs, une brèche politique à l’heure du numérique (The Commons: a policy breach in the digital age)"
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Initial publication by CIRIDD - ECLAIRA newsletter No. 2 - January 2016
