Commons and cooperatives: A new governance of collective action

Abstract

The Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) is emerging as a social movement capable of moving society beyond the imbalances of the capitalist market economy and its top‐down regulation by the state. But the SSE's progress has been slow while unresolved challenges (e.g., climate, inequality) continue to intensify. Among communitarian responses to these challenges, the commons have shown great potential as a shared governance mechanism for the responsible management of common‐pool resources. To the extent that this success encourages broader applicability for commons, we focus also on commoning as crucial social practice rooted in collective action and adaptive governance. Adding this dimension of activism opens the possibility of enriching the SSE both in theory and practice for the purpose of strengthening its institutional make‐up, in particular cooperatives occupying a central position in SSE. Commoning enables us to conceive of tangible connections between commons and cooperatives as complementary modes of anti‐capitalist organization. We can illustrate this complementarity by analyzing how Ostrom's “design principles” for commons can help strengthen the ICA's Cooperative Principles. Useful lessons can be learned from concrete examples of commons–cooperative alliances, such as Ecuador's Buen Vivir initiative, the Enercoop PACA project in France, and Oakland's OmniCommons space.

Sustainability Indicators: Information Asymmetry Mitigators between Cooperative Organizations and Their Primary Stakeholders

“…They can be effective and efficient collective choices even in a capitalist system. They can also be community responses by which social actors unite as a third force, between the market and the state, to defend the public interest and social justice [28,29].…”

Crowdfunding for Social Economy organisations: success factors

“…In addition, the Social Economy has added a solidarity dimension by putting in place all kinds of governance schemes based on solidarity organisation and collective action, including, among others, funding modalities such as crowdfunding (Guttmann, 2021).…”

Co-operatives for sustainable development

“…It posits that the ability of any given co-operative to sustainably preserve its resources and those of the community within which it operates will depend on its specific governance structures (which may be tied to a specific legal form and be aligned, to some degree, with the CVPs), the characteristics of the community and the broader institutional environment, and the interactions between these elements. These considerations highlight a key contribution of the project, which is that it connects the emerging literature on co-operatives as commons (Adams & Deakin, 2017;Guttmann, 2020;Healy, 2018;Ridley-Duff & Bull, 2021;Tortia, 2018) with an existing (but small) co-operative studies literature on institutional complementarities (Feng & Hendrikse, 2008;Gagliardi, 2009aGagliardi, , 2009bGrashuis & Cook, 2017;Ridley-Ruff, 2009). Making this link is important not simply because the two strands have thus far developed independently of each other, but because their connection can help us capture the nature of the co-operative firm while accounting for the interdependencies between co-operatives and the socio-economic environment within which they are embedded.…”

“…Although economists have since mostly moved on (Cook & Grashuis, 2018), the damage has remained. This is perhaps why some degree of scepticism about the scale of the impact that co-operatives can make can be observed even among advocates of co-operation (Guttmann, 2020).…”