Definitions of Commoning

This is a collection of definitions and framings of commoning by different authors, both scholars and practicioneers.

In their book "Commoning as a postcapitalist politics" from 2015, J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy describe „(T)the practice of commoning as postcapitalist politics." (2006)

„… we have proposed that commoning might become the focus of a politics for our times.“ (ibid)

the collection

Ways of Commoning. source

- commoning is „care for the commons“ (Bresnihan 2013) - commoning produces commons (Meretz 2013) - commoning means: "bring people together to build collective forms for sharing resources, spaces, and knowledge, in response to situational threats to survival or well-being“ (Hollender 2016: abstract) - commoning consists of "the processes of experimentation that Commons communities undergo as they build the necessary organizational, social, economic, political, and legal forms that make sharing the Commons possible, often give rise to new forms of inclusive, autonomous, and collective governance.“ principles included in commoning practices according to Hollender are: open-endedness, pluriversality, prefigurative politics - „Commoning is [...] strongly related to sharing and participating, in a way that does not separate us from others. It also lets us recognise that negotiating through neighbouring means to take the matter of our lives into our collective hands. In addition, we can say that commoning is a way to support the relations between people and things by the principles of responsibility and equality in order to work towards social justice.“ (Campus in Camps, COLLECTIVE DICTIONARY, COMMONS & COMMONING, WWW.CAMPUSINCAMPS.PS:11/12) - commoning is "producing common worlds" or "build worlds together" ... "in many ways in at many different scales, work to produce a feeling of being in common“ (Leila Dawney 2013: Commoning: the production of common worlds:33) - „The “commoning” that I outline here stems from practices that look beyond our immediate worlds, and an ethos that considers the effects of our actions in these terms. If we FEEL like we inhabit common worlds – that we have SHARED STAKES THAT EXTEND BEYOND THE IMMEDIATE – then we can foster an ethos of collective responsibility and care towards the world. (ibid, emphasis is mine)

Peter Doran writes, on the last page of "A Political Economy of Attention, Mindfulness and Consumerism", Routledge 2017 html :

Commoning is about rendering visible that which has been enclosed, cut off; it is about public remembering, and restoring the deep connection between a community’s values-intentions and the connections they can establish with a shared resource.