Volume VI — Governance and the Commons

Four colleagues walking toward a long table set with dried grasses, the room bright with sun. — Plate VI.01The Table Before the Meeting.A decision rule is furniture. It decides who can be in the room, how long they will be there, and who is not in the room at all — and it does this before anybody has said a word.

Nº VI.01

Who Decides

Every organisation you have ever been inside had an answer to the question at the top of this page, and almost none of them had written it down.

A woman standing at the far end of a glass boardroom table, speaking to the board seated on either side. — Plate VI.02The Thursday Tribunal.The Tribunal de las Aguas has met outside the cathedral in Valencia, on Thursdays, for roughly a thousand years. It keeps no written record of its judgments. It has never needed one, because everybody who matters was standing there.

Nº VI.02

Ostrom, Fully Applied

You have almost certainly met the eight design principles already.

A small group walking and talking together through a warm office, lamps lit overhead. — Plate VI.03The Room Where It Was Already Decided.A nested structure is not a room without authority. It is a room that holds the authority for the thing it is about, and hands nothing upward that it can finish itself.

Nº VI.03

Holarchy Without Hierarchy

You have probably been in both kinds of organisation, and you have probably noticed that the second kind is not simply the first kind with the managers removed.

A woman in a white dress standing in a stone archway, an olive tree behind her in warm light. — Plate VI.04Thursday, Noon, the Apostles' Door.The oldest working court in Europe has no building, no transcript and no appeal. It has eight chairs, one hour a week, and seven hundred years of people turning up.

Nº VI.04

The Commons That Held

You have been told that the commons is a tragedy, and then — if you read a little further — that Elinor Ostrom disproved it.

A woman seated on the floor of a long white room reading, a cup and a teapot beside her, candles lit. — Plate VI.05Six Years of Paper.Every collapse in this chapter was measured before it happened, written down, and published. The interval between the writing and the falling is the only number here that generalises.

Nº VI.05

Chapter VI.04 walked the commons that held — the Törbel alps kept under one set of rules since 1483; the huerta of Valencia with a water court that has sat on Thursdays for longer than most nations have existed, the Japanese iriai forests, the Alanya inshore fishery.

A man in a pale suit walking through a glass-roofed hall of plants, the low sun behind him. — Plate VI.06The Hall, Before the Count.A vote is a claim about who decided. A count is the only thing that can test it, and somebody has to stay late to do the counting.

Nº VI.06

Participatory Budgeting, Measured

You have almost certainly heard that a Brazilian city let its residents decide the budget and infant mortality fell.

A watercolour of a house beside a river among trees and agave, hills in the distance. — Plate VI.07Two Signatures, One River.A right that nobody is paid to exercise is a sentence. A right with an office, a budget and two names on the appointment is an instrument.

Nº VI.07

Law as a Living Instrument

You have probably heard that a river in New Zealand is a legal person, and that Ecuador put the rights of nature into its constitution, and that a court in India once declared the Ganga a living entity.

A team seated around a white table in a meeting, one woman standing to speak, a board of sketches behind them. — Plate VI.08The Two Maps on One Table.Every argument about who decides is, underneath, an argument about whether the boundary of the decision matches the boundary of its consequences. Put the two maps on one table and most of the argument goes quiet.

Nº VI.08

Federation and Subsidiarity

You have been handed a question that sounds political and is not.

A woman in linen standing at a doorway beside a young olive tree, warm light in the room behind her. — Plate VI.09Thursday, Noon, at the Cathedral Door.A conflict system is not a document either. It is a place, a time, and a group of people who are known to be there — and the cheapest of the three to provide is the place.

Nº VI.09

Conflict, Repair, and the Long Table

You are writing rules for something — a cooperative, a commons, a firm, a community land trust, a team of eleven — and you have reached the part that everyone reaches and nobody enjoys.

Four colleagues standing in conversation by a wall of windows, the sun low behind them. — Plate VI.10Five Years of Tuesdays.Nobody wrote these to be compared with each other. That is exactly why they can be.

Nº VI.10

Auditing a Governance System

You have read the constitution.

A watercolour of a small settlement at the foot of red cliffs, houses among scrub and desert trees. — Plate VI.11The Boundary Stone.A boundary is what makes a commons governable. It is also the whole of what a commons cannot see. The stone is not a wall; it is a decision about whose voice counts, made once, in stone, by people who are no longer here.

Nº VI.11

The Limits of Self-Governance

This chapter closes Volume VI, and it is the one to hand to the person in your organisation who thinks all of this is charming and none of it is serious.

The extensions

Three chapters that make the volume usable by practitioners of Luminous Economics and by people inside corporations alike — because they are not different economies, only different vocabularies.