A Stunning Visual History of English Land Commoners and Their Folk Culture

DavidBollier — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Our modern mental maps of commons are woefully inadequate, in part because we have forgotten the history of commons and its once-flourishing folk culture.

Leah Gordon, an English photographer, writer, and filmmaker has set out to fix that through a deep dive into the history of English commons. The result, produced with two collaborators, is her fascinating and beautiful book, Common People: A Folk History of Land Rights, Enclosure and Resistance. Her two partners in the project are Stephen Ellcock, a renowned visual curator, and writer Anabelle Edwards, who has studied alternative lifestyles that reject the modern market/state and its culture.

British photographer, writer, filmmaker Leah Gordon

Common People is a stunning visual portrayal of English commoners over the centuries. It looks at their everyday struggles, feelings, creativity, and cultures, bringing the human vitality of that world alive in ways that print usually does not.

The book draws upon dozens of captivating paintings, etchings, and folk relics from English history as well as many contemporary photographs of commoners who carry on premodern traditions. The photos, taken by Gordon and Edwards, provide revealing glimpses into the eccentric, glorious, and sometimes unsettling realities of commoning as a culture.

There is the tradition of The Burryman, for example. For 1,000 years, on the second Friday in August, the English town of South Queensferry has selected a man to dress up in a costume covered with about 11,000 itchy plant burrs, with openings only for his eyes, nose, and mouth. The role can only be played by a man born there and “requires deep commitment,” said Gordon. The Burryman then walks a ceremonial nine-mile route while carrying flower-covered rakes, along with two attendants, and is frequently plied with shots of whiskey along the route. The origins of the tradition may have been to bring good luck to local fishermen or to commemorate the hiding of Scottish king Malcom III from the English, through this disguise.

To learn such curiously fantastic commons traditions, I spoke with Leah Gordon in my l

The Burryman of South Queensferry. Photo by Leah Gordon

It quickly becomes clear that Common People is not just a history of commons. It is also about how memory of the commons persists through a shared culture, shaping contemporary life and politics. The book contains a photo of the Travelly Well, which has been used to water livestock for thousands of years; it is near an ancient route used by travelers. In Longmead, England, commoners host a spectacular event twice a year in which herding dogs escort large flocks of sheep back from common fields in the highlands.

David and Sandra Webb, holders of user-rights to Silvington Common. Photo by Leah Gordon

There are many English people who legally hold rights to commons via their land ownership, sometimes in improbable modern settings. Through their land deed, David and Sandra Webb have rights to use Silvington Common for the right of pannage (pigs grazing acorns in the forest), the right of estover (collecting wood for fuel and fencing), and piscary rights (taking fish, which are gone).

Poacher. Photo by Leah Gordon

Modern-day commoners often manifest in different social identities than they did centuries ago while nonetheless continuing cherished traditions and values. For example, today’s commoners may be activists who campaign against new highways and nuclear power in order to defend the land. They resist limits on their “right to roam” and camp on privately owned land, echoing memorable acts of civil disobedience such as the Kinder Scout mass trespass of 1932 in which thousands of commoners surged over private land to protest enclosures.

Yesterday’s commoners were often forcibly marginalized by emerging capitalist society. Today’s commoners may have been similarly pushed to the margins of mainstream life as Ramblers, Gypsies, nomadic travelers, festival-goers, ravers, and nature lovers. Gordon has photos of them all, many posed in old-style clothing and postures, their images printed with old-timey color-tints to echo the archaic colorizing technique of 18th Century photographs.

A series of essays accompany the book’s many images, providing detailed treatment of such themes as “Enclosed Land and Vanquished Peasants,” “Rural Rebels and Traditions,” and “Vagabonds.” The essays are useful complements to the evocative photographs and art works, providing background histories of the premodern experience of being a commoner.

Gordon explained that some of her interest in the commons comes from growing up between Liverpool, once a center for the slave trade, and Manchester, where the Industrial Revolution got started. She came to realize that enclosures of commons were an essential third force propelling early capitalism.

At a certain point, Manchester industrialists came to see that “the plantation system based on slavery wasn’t creating enough capital any more,” said Gordon, citing the book

Brave New Alps: New Forms of Rural Resurgence Through Commoning and Care

DavidBollier — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

To outsiders, the Alps may conjure images of majestic mountain landscapes and carefree ski vacations. But to tens of thousands of people living in small Alpine towns, the challenges they face aren’t so different from those of many rural towns: How to meet basic needs and make the economy more resilient? How to deal with the worsening disruptions of climate change? How to assert greater regional control when distant, city-based politicians and investors push very different priorities?

Paradoxically enough, remote rural locations are precisely where a lot of exciting ecosocial and economic innovations are arising. Constraint tends to focus the mind and expand the imagination. It forces people to think creatively, leading to unexpectedly robust innovations.

These were my conclusions after interviewing designer . The group began as a collaboration between Elzenbaumer and her partner

Bianca Elzenbaumer, cofounder of Brave New Alps

Elzenbaumer explained in an essay: “After having studied and worked as an eco-social designer across Europe and Palestine, my partner and I decided to dedicate our next 40 years studying how design can support commons and community economies” in a post-capitalist world.

By 2012, Brave New Alps had evolved into a formal “cultural association” dedicated to building community design practices that could “reconfigure the politics of social and environmental issues.” But their vision of development had a significant twist. They wanted to build systems that could operate beyond markets, such as commons, and to step outside the conventional client-designer framework in favor of participatory processes.

Intrigued, I interviewed Bianca Elzenbaumer for

Alpine Community Economies Laboratory

Some of its most prominent projects include a community academy called ; and the , a highly competitive award that honors innovative building projects that focus on sustainability, inclusiveness, and beauty. The project prioritizes social and ecological concerns, informal economic exchange, and acts of community care.

The Eco Lab fosters mental health and well-being by hosting “convivial practice” in non-stigmatizing spaces for anyone who wishes to participate. There are monthly outings in the surrounding areas and sessions for “repair and sewing, social gardening, carpentry, and cooking” led by local residents eager to share their passions and skills.

SEXyProject is a welcoming space for open dialogue about sexuality and emotional education, aimed at young people and teenagers.

Forno Vagabondo is a traveling community bakery that uses an oven on an electric cargo bike to bake bread and focaccia in various public squares, parks, and borders between city and countryside. The goal is to foster community relationships in public spaces while teaching the practice of breadmaking. The process also makes abstract ecological issues, like the source of grains and other ingredients, more tangible to people.

Skeptics may wonder how such heterodox experiments in commoning are funded. Elzenbaumer jokingly explained: “We have this slogan, ‘No money, no problem.’ It’s not completely true that no money is no problem. But it really helps us to remember, Don’t put the money first. Look first at what do we need, what do others need in this community, and galvanize people around those needs, but also the desires connected to those needs. And then, let the money come later.”

Members of Brave New Alps at work

“And this is where we bring in commons and community economies, in theory and practice, to say, well, but we have each other. Every one of us has some resources to share, has something to contribute. Let’s work with that first.”

New initiatives arise from people’s “feral” enthusiasm for a project, their willingness to contribute, the open invitation to others to join, and a collective discipline in making things happen. Funders and institutions with in-kind support sense that energy and commitment. Somehow resources seem to materialize.

While this approach may sound counterintuitive and risky, the courage to engage with real needs and produce solid results has a power of its own. There is also power in recognizing that huge amounts of value quietly arise from outside of market economies and the state.

This is the notable insight of the famous iceberg image developed by the Community Economies Research Network. In standard economics, value is the visible tip of the iceberg -- wage labor, commodity markets, and capitalist enterprise. But beneath the water, the bulk of the iceberg features other, non-transactional varieties of value-creation -- social, local, informal, ecological -- which markets and state power cannot see or mobilize. These include neighborly assistance, barter, care work, open source collaborations, libraries, gifting, scavenging, and much else. Brave New Alps help mobilize these forces for commoning and change.

For more, listen to my full interview with Bianca Elzenbaumer ____________

For some videos about La Foresta’s work, see this and another featuring the

Jeremy Lent’s ‘Ecocivilization’ – A Bold Vision for System Change

DavidBollier — Fri, 01 May 2026 04:00:00 +0000

With so many social movements seeking system change – cooperatives, commons, Doughnut Economics, peer production, relocalization and more – things quickly get confusing. There are so many different vocabularies, political premises, and theories of change swirling about. How can we possibly work toward a coherent, common future?

is possible precisely by drawing upon the rich pluriverse of possibilities. Lent’s book is therefore a relief to encounter. At last, a bold, empirically grounded vision of how diverse players could construct a post-capitalist world.

I’ve known Jeremy and his thinking in previous books for eight or ten years, especially through The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning. The Patterning Instinct, published in 2017, distills a vast scholarly literature to describe humanity’s search for meaning – from the time of hunter-gatherers to early agricultural civilizations to modern societies and religion traditions. The Web of Meaning, published in 2021, explores how traditional wisdom and modern science could together provide a new narrative for modern humans. (My 2021 blog post and podcast interview with Jeremy about The Web of Meaning, can be found here.)

Naturally, I was excited to learn more about Ecocivilization, a book that Lent had been working on for five years. So I asked Jeremy to join me on

Ecocivilization starts by providing an incisive overview of the history of modern capitalism. He introduces the mythical Indigenous figure of Windigo as a shorthand for the voracious, predatory hunger driving capitalism. Windigo is a terrifying monster in Ojibwe mythology that is always hungry and has a heart of ice.

“If it caught you, it would take a bite out of you. And the more of you that a Windigo ate, the hungrier it got,” said Lent. “The worst thing was, if you got bitten by one, you turned into a Windigo monster yourself, doomed always to roam the world to eat more and more, never satisfied.

“When Europeans arrived in North America with a gold fever and a desire to keep taking more and more, the Ojibwe looked at them and said, ‘This is Windigo!’”

After a few succinct chapters on the pathologies of capitalism, Ecocivilization gets down to the work at hand – explaining multiple strategies for revamping the economy. In sixteen chapters, he addresses a wide spectrum of domains – business organization, agriculture, technology, finance, infrastructures, law, global governance, and more.

Here’s a quick sampling of the types of prescriptions that Lent offers:

Industry must begin to embrace the principles of the “circular economy” to minimize wastes and begin to account for the market “externalities” (pollution, social disruptions, over-development) of conventional commerce.

Agriculture must embrace agroecology priniciples and perennial crops. It must move away from factory farming and toward small farms and local food systems.

Wealth inequality can be addressed through caps on wealth, inheritance taxes, and commonwealth trusts serving the common good.

Modern systems of fiat currency need to make room for alternative currencies, community-owned public banks, and debt jubilees to wipe debts clean. Universal basic income schemes should be enacted.

To escape growing forms of techno-feudalism, digital technologies need to become open source and distributed, not centralized and consolidated. We need greater commons-based peer production and cosmolocal production (open source design and local physical production). We need public-platform accelerators to help finance and incubate these tech designs, including convivial technologies that escape closed, proprietary systems and enable users to use tech systems to serve their own needs.

What unites the many vectors of change that Lent chronicles is their capacity to bring about stable, sustainable, fair, and dignified ways of life for all. He wants to outline “a new global system of living, one based on life-affirming principles modeled after nature’s own design.”

This is no idiosyncratic personal vision, however. Lent’s goal is to synthesize dozens of proven and promising genres of existing projects and real-world activism. Some of these are daring and paradigm-breaking. Others operate well within the dominant market/state system but offer credible possibilities for post-capitalist transitions.

The framework that Lent uses for conceptualizing system change is known as the “Three Horizons Model.” It posits three interlinked realms of strategy and action. Initiatives operating within the “first horizon” accept the premises of current institutions and try to eke out incremental improvements within them. Think: laws, regulations, and business models to "reform" the system. In our time, horizon one has been largely neutered by big money, political corruption, and free-market ideology.

The “second horizon” is also bounded by current political and economic realities, but its strategies aim to disrupt conventional practices and move beyond them. Sometimes horizon two gambits are exposed as charades or feints toward the transformative. Companies may find it useful to use use deceptive approaches or PR strategies to make their initiatives appear more progressive and consequential than they really are.

Such examples earn the tag, horizon "two-minus.” They can be seen in the plastics industry’s duplicitous recycling programs purporting to solve the problem of plastic waste; and in Wall Street’s ESG (“environmental, social, governance”) investment filters, which were quickly dismantled when the Trump II administration took office.

In some instances, however, horizon two strategies actually open up new fissures in conventional logics and politics, providing enough visibility and space for activists to open up pathways to horizon three – an Ontological Shift to a new paradigm.

The third horizon, writes Lent, refers to “ideas that are outside the ballpark, shifting the entire paradigm and thus permitting possibilities that could never have been imagined within the first two horizons.”

In Ecocivilization, Lent clearly wants to take readers – or at least, those of us in the Western world – to horizon three. These are his preferred examples, but he also, necessarily, cites attractive examples within horizon two that could be helpful.

The hard truth of the matter is that getting from horizon one to the paradigm shift of horizon three – a space unintelligible to people living within horizon one – requires patience, ingenuity, and a sharp machete for hacking a pathway there.

Years ago, Lent created The , a new group that seeks to actualize some of the transformative ideas described in Ecocivilization, the book.

The group takes inspiration from a bit of wisdom by Nobel Laureate Ilya Progogine, a chemist: “When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to lift the entire system to a higher order.” There are many islands of coherence out there. Can we expand and interconnect them, and begin to enter horizon three?

You can listen to my recent interview with Jeremy Lent

One point of using a Creative Commons license is to make a book (and other creative works) as widely available as possible. To that end, I’m thrilled to announce a new stage in the life of .

The printed text of the book is now posted online, for free. Here’s the weblink:

The license essentially means that the work can be copied and shared so long as credit is given to me as the author (BY). Noncommercial uses are allowed without permission, but any commercial reuses require my permission (NC). Any derivative uses of this book, including translations, new printings, and excerpts, are permissible so long as they also use the same license requiring sharing (SA).

I’m also happy to announce that an audiobook version of the book is now available, at

I had not given much thought to doing an audiobook because I didn’t like the terms offered by Audible, the near-monopoly retailer of audiobooks owned by Amazon.

Audible’s exclusive contracts with authors prevent libraries and independent bookstores from lending or selling audiobooks, in effect preventing competition. Its royalty rates are below industry standards, and author complaints about lack of transparency are legion. Audible also uses digital rights management (DRM) technology that vastly empowers sellers to set the terms of the user experience, by, for example, dictating what devices may be used to listen to an audiobook, declaring whether sharing is possible (generally no), and making it difficult for authors and users to leave the Audible platform.

[For more on Audible’s hammerlock on audiobook sales and their anti-social terms, see

This Thai edition of 'Think Like a Commoner, 2d Edition' (2025) may not have occurred without a Creative Commons license authorizing a derivative use at no cost.

Fortunately, my friends at

Understanding how online communities function is a particularly vexing challenge. For example, is a wiki best understood as a volunteer club and nonprofit organization? Or does it more closely resemble a business that organizes the wisdom of crowd -- or tames the unruliness of a mob? It becomes even more complicated when you consider that wikis have porous boundaries, enabling people to become either formal members or casual lurkers.

People trying to grasp how collaborative spaces work often turn to the literature of the commons. It has a lot to say about the dynamics of collective action and sharing wealth, after all. But does the stewardship of land or water really resemble the stewardship of online information by quasi-strangers scattered around the world?

Professor Benjamin Mako Hill

These are the sorts of conceptual challenges that tug at Benjamin Mako Hill, a computer science professor at the University of Washington and scholar of digital collaboration. Mako, as he’s usually called, brings special talents to this inquiry. He’s not just a scientist and scholar, but a committed free software activist and hacker who has made significant contributors to the Debian and Ubuntu projects, two versions of the GNU/Linux computer operating system. He advises the Wikipedia project and has received a prestigious US National Science Foundation grant to study the governance and lifecycles of knowledge commons.

I was curious to learn more about the social life and governance of digital commons, so I invited Hill to join me on

“If you look at the median number of contributors to an open source software project,” said Hill, “it's a single person. If you look at the median number of contributors to wiki on a large wiki-hosting platform, it's very often no more than a small handful.” This situation naturally motivates collaborative sites to make themselves quite open to anyone who wants to contribute.

But as the number of participants on a site grows, perhaps acquiring a reputation in specialist circles or even mainstream culture, the needs of the community changes. Its members need to protect their stock of knowledge from increasing attacks by vandals and trolls. Such attacks tend to become more frequent as the community becomes larger and more robust.

But at a later stage of development, the goal of attracting newcomers often comes into conflict with the need to protect the shared wealth of the community from attacks. “Wikipedia is one of the top ten websites in the world,” said Hill, “so there are a lot of eyeballs on it and a lot people who want to vandalize it….Epistemic legitimacy [of a collaborative website] can absolutely be appropriated.” So steps need to be taken to protect that commons.

He cited the cautionary example of the Croatian language edition of Wikipedia and its startling takeover. “For a period of about ten years, Wikipedia Croatia was completed captured by a cabal of far-right Croatian nationalists,” he said, which resulted in the site becoming a haven for Holocaust denialism, for example. Croatia was the site of the third largest concentration camp in Europe during the Second World War, but you wouldn't have known that if you looked in Croatian Wikipedia between 2010 and 2020. I think that this represents a kind of threat that is actually common to a lot of peer production projects.”

But dealing with attacks or attempted takeovers can require serious tradeoffs in the terms of the governance of collaborative websites. A common response is to create new types of security and participation filters. This can secure the shared stock of information from vandalism and disruption, but it can also make it more difficult for people to contribute to the site. This, in turn, can lead to a decline in the quality of information collectively contributed.

One favored solution is to restrict participation to people who have registered accounts, thereby preventing anonymous contributions. Several Wikipedia editions have in fact done this, including the English language, Portuguese, and Farsi versions of the site. So have many alternative wikis such as Wookieepedia,

Mako Hill, adrift in a sea of plastic orbs

Initially, in the early 2000s, commoners had figured out that the only way to scale collaboration to massive sizes of participants, was to make content really open, put it out under a free license, and manage it all as a commons. “That, in fact, was the only way that we knew how to do it,” said Hill. Before corporate platforms arrived, that’s how open source software, blogs, wikis, and other collaborative innovations sustained themselves as commons.

When the iPhone launched in 2007, Hill noted, there was no App Store. The iPhone was sold with only the apps that Apple had installed on it. But enough iPhone owners were unhappy with this arrangement. An estimated 25% of all iPhones sold were “jailbroken,” or hacked, to enable users to fix bugs and install homegrown, non-Apple apps.

After first fighting this development, Apple realized that this was a battle it couldn’t win. So it created the App Store, allowing anyone to make apps for the IPhone. But Apple insisted upon becoming the official gatekeeper of the apps, with its own terms of what could be sold. It also charged a 30% fee to developers to retail their apps via the App Store.

This became a rough model for other tech companies to exploit and refine: use one’s capital, market power, and tech to enclose a social community….monetize people's relationships and personal information through data surveillance and targeted marketing….and slowly privatize control over the community by converting it into a hybrid market of individuals. Cory Doctorow has incisively called this process (which has other dimensions) “enshittification.”

Despite such forces, Hill believes that digital commoners can secure control over their shared wealth and innovation ecosystems, even with the potent threats posed by new AI systems. You can listen to my full interview with Mako Hill

Humanity cannot continue to expand production and consumption exponentially on a finite planet. It’s biophysically impossible. The carbon emissions are already producing more volatile weather patterns, more frequent floods, droughts, and wildfires, and disruptions of agriculture, commerce and global supply chains.

And yet the US Government and respectable opinion remain in zones of denial or deflection. The Trump administration is savaging climate science, environmental regulation, and international treaties, while saner responsible adults are at least focused on energy efficiency and renewables. But few people dare to name, let alone tackle, the real driver of climate collapse – the capitalist economy’s demand for relentless economic growth.

Professor Federico Savini, University of Amsterdam

To take stock of this quandary, I decided to have a long talk with a leading degrowth scholar and activist,, Savini has suggested how cities, agriculture, energy, and transit need to change, and how affordable housing, better land stewardship, and infrastructures for social care and eco-resilience could help reduce climate impacts.

I recently interviewed Savini for my podcast

But to the extent that economic growth and carbon-fuel usage are tightly linked – and not capable of being “decoupled” – some degrowth agenda is ultimately inescapable. The only question may be whether it will arrive via catastrophe or choice.

Savini concedes, “The term degrowth is not a political winning narrative. This is quite clear. You don't get votes or move large masses of people with terms like ‘degrowth’ or ‘postgrowth.’” He explained that these terms “are often used by scholars to make an analysis of the socio-ecological consequences of capitalism,” but that crafting a mainstream political message “is not our job. We're not politicians.”

Having said that, Savini notes that degrowth is playing an important role in central and western European countries today. “Many cities are open to engaging with these new narratives of social transitions that have explicit social targets at their core,” he said.

Savini stresses that the social and ecological are “two sides of the same coin” in that both are connected to economic growth. Growth is often justified as the best way to create a surplus and tax revenues that can fund essential social services for everyone, but that very growth also expands carbon emissions and destroys ecosystems.

“The way to break this vicious circle,” Savini argues, “is to focus explicitly on building up the essential economies of care, housing, transport, health, education, creativity and art.” This can “reduce the need to push for economic growth." The challenge “is to break the link between the provision of essential services and the need to produce aggregate economic wealth.” And the only way to do that is to stop privatizing and commodifying all the social services that are needed.

Here is where a variety of social movements offer constructive options. Commons, cooperatives, the Solidarity Economy, cosmolocal production, peer production, community wealth-building, bioregional forms of relocalization -- they all are doing a fairly good job in trying to build a prefigurative social and economic order, at least in Europe, said Savini.

What’s not occurring, however, is a change of political attitudes that can win elections and change state policies. Citing the work of political scientist Erik Olin Wright, Savini believes that various system-change movements need to come together to work for a rupture in politics-as-usual, enough to create “a post-capitalist transition.”

This transition may be more imminent in regions of the world, especially the Global South, where climate-driven collapse is already occurring. In places experiencing severe drought and flooding, basic services essential for survival “cannot be provided at affordable and accessible costs," said Savini. In these areas, people are thinking about how to create or regenerate the economy in ways that can increase their security and autonomy.

Savini admits that the word “autonomy” is a loaded term that is usually seen in capitalist contexts. But for him, “It’s very simple: the socially just way to define autonomy is cooperation. If you are cooperating, you are autonomous subjects who need each other to support each other. This is the socially progressive view of autonomy. It's cooperation.”

You can listen to my full interview with Federico Savini

The western world has long promoted “development” as a high-minded mission to bring capitalist markets and growth to impoverished areas of the world. But what if development were seen not just as a matter of creating markets, but of strengthening social collaboration and sharing in meeting needs? In short, what if development agencies were to support commoning?

One major national development agency – the

Stéphanie Leyronas of Agence Française de Developpement (AFD)

To learn more, I spoke with Leyronas for , Leyronas explained how supporting the commons requires that development programs engage with the “relational logics” of a community. It has to focus on how people relate to each other, learn to cooperate, and care for natural systems. There must be time and space for commoners to experiment, to develop a collective solidarity and stewardship of shared wealth; to collectively learn; and to integrate practice & reflection, even at small scales.

It is an interesting sign that the FAO – a major global institution dedicated to improving agriculture and food security – is beginning to recognize commoning in its work. At an October 2025 conference in Rome, top officials publicly embraced the social and practical logics that commoning entails in a session entitled, “From Silos to Cooperation: Shifting science, technology and innovation paradigms for sustainability transitions.”

In our podcast interview, Leyronas stressed that taking the commons seriously requires a reassessment of the character of time, knowledge, and nature. “Today, we have a linear view of time in which progress lies ahead and there is only one direction to time.” Modern life presumes that instrumental, expert rationality is the best way to manage natural resources. But this is misleading, Leyronas suggested, because it fails to take account of social relations, processes, and context. In many instances, local, situated knowledge has much to contribute, but development agencies tend to impose their own scientific, decontextualized, expert knowledge on communities.

Development donors often presume that their scientific knowledge is “objective” and superior to the types of knowledge that local commoners bring to the table, said Leyronas. Expert rationality and objectivity are often used to justify the imposition of top-down “solutions” on communities, and the distancing of donor-experts from the affected communities. But Leyronas emphasized that “we [development agencies] are fully embedded in power relations. We are carrying our own value constraints.”

Adopting a commons-based approach to development is helpful, she suggested, because it requires “a more embedded, collaborative process” to help “mobilize local knowledge." Embracing a commons framework requires a shift of epistemology, too. Different (relational) categories of thought and language must be adopted.

Leyronas cautions that AFD’s commons work is a relatively small, exploratory project. And yet it has attracted keen interest in the development community. In 2017, the World Bank was starting to look at development through the lens of political economy. This led to a partnership with AFD in producing a 2023 book,

For now, the investor class seems to prefer authoritarian drift over democracy, or at least acquiescence to the former. In coming years, it will be difficult to implement or champion forms of “development” that are not stable, humane, fair, and eco-sustainable. The commons paradigm offers many promising alternative pathways forward.

You can listen to my interview with Stéphanie Leyronas

In the late 1970s, well before I became interested in the commons, one of the most formative books that I encountered, at age 23, was . I first read an excerpt in the Whole Earth Review – the countercultural quarterly edited by Stewart Brand – and shortly thereafter the book. I was thunderstruck by the invisible social relationships wrought by gifts and their karmic ramifications, all of which Hyde brought vividly into view.

Drawing on anthropologist Marcel Mauss’ famous 1923 book on gift-exchange, Hyde took the idea much further, showing how gift exchange is a ubiquitous social phenomenon for forging and maintaining reciprocal relationships. As Hyde shows, gift economies of reciprocity are particularly important to artists and creative communities in their functioning as commons. In their artistry, musicians and performers must learn to see their creative talents as gifts, something they must share without expectation or guarantee of return, but invariably important benefits materialize – inspiration, creative mastery, a sense of belonging – that manifests as if by grace.

Lewis Hyde. Photo credit: Anna Schuleit Haber

These ideas had obvious value when I began exploring the commons in the late 1990s. Hyde cites many examples in all sorts of unexpected realms of how gift exchange animates a gentle reciprocity and mutual benefits – blood banks and organ donation systems, Indigenous culture and countless artistic contexts. The generativity of gift-exchange has an almost mysterious aura and spiritual dimensions, as ratified numerous fairy tales affirm.

After being so influenced by The Gift in my younger day, I recently asked Hyde to join me for a conversation on my podcast,

Since writing The Gift as a young man, Hyde has gone on to become one of the most distinctive voices in American letters: a celebrated scholar, essayist, literary critic, poet, and MacArthur Fellow. He taught for many years at Kenyon College, and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

We could have enjoyably discussed a wide variety of topics on the podcast. Hyde has written about such diverse topics as the mythic tradition of trickster, Henry David Thoreau’s essays, the “oxherding series” of medieval Chinese poems and drawings about Buddhist practice, and the art of forgetting as a path to peace and rebirth, among other topics.

But in our conversation, we focused on his writings about the commons, especially The Gift and Common as Air. Both books avoid the stylized, often-clotted discourses of academia, dealing with their topics with the expressive wisdom of a poet, sage, and engaged citizen, but also with the rigor of a scholar and historian.

The Gift was illuminating for me in showing how circuits of gift-exchange operate with very different social logics and values than capitalist culture. Hyde is quick to note that his book “was not necessarily an attack on capitalism or on the market economy, but in fact, a simple act of differentiation. It was saying, These two things [capitalist culture and gift-exchange] are really different in kind, seriously so.”

This theme was an urgent personal concern for Hyde when he wrote the book as a struggling poet his late twenties. The Gift was a way of making sense of the tensions of trying to be an artist in a capitalist society that reflexively commodifies everything. In our podcast, Hyde told me that the book was a way of explaining, “If what you do as a poet doesn't fit into the commercial economy, that's not a problem.”

For me, I now realize in hindsight, The Gift was equally an early meditation on the inner dimensions of commoning. While the commons in the 1970s and beyond were largely treated as an economic topic – how can people collectively managed shared resources? – Hyde showed how gift-exchange is a deeply relational phenomenon that is central to the human condition.

Lewis and I had crossed paths in the early 2000s when both of us, from different angles, became concerned with copyright law as serious obstruction of creative and cultural freedom. My interests resulted in my co-founding .

As early Internet culture was exploding, the music, film, and publishing industries were panicking at the prospect of nonmarket online sharing obliterating their markets. They largely succeeded in expanding the scope and enforcement penalties of copyright law – the very tensions between commercialism and creativity that Hyde had explored, in a different context, in The Gift. But that time also saw the significant emergence of the Creative Commons licenses, which copyright holders can use to authorize the sharing and reuse of their works.

Hyde recalls, “I began then to think, in a way naively, that if people only knew the history of this [creativity and intellectual property law], they would not pass a law” that squashed creative innovation and sharing. “I was wrong about that,” he concedes.

Nonetheless, Hyde brilliantly excavates from history many stories of invention (Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod and wood stove), intergenerational borrowing (Bob Dylan of Woody Guthrie’s folk music), and scientific research (the Human Genome Project’s attempt to keep genome sequences in the public domain), all of which expose capitalist mythologies about individual genius and creativity at the expense of collective influences.

In Common as Air, Hyde takes these themes to a deeper level, exploring the very idea of the fixed, individual “self” that intellectual property implies. He cites a letter by the poet Rimbaud who once wrote, “I is someone else.” Bob Dylan, similarly, once wrote, “That day I listened all afternoon to Guthrie as if in a trance and I felt like I had discovered some essence of self-command, that I was in the internal pocket of the system, feeling more like myself than ever before.” A voice in my head said, ‘So this is the game.’” The best artists discover that creativity is a co-mingling of souls.

You can listen to my interview with Lewis Hyde

This is the fifth and final section of an essay, "Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions," by David Bollier and Natasha Hulst. The full essay can be downloaded as a PDF here and at Natasha Hulst's Section 1. Introduction & Reframing the Economy Around Bioregioning; 2. Commons as Relational Provisioning and Governance; 3. Toward a New Theory of Value (and Meaning): Living Systems as Generative; and 4. Toward Socio-ecological Markets.

5. Relationalized Finance: Bridging the Chasm

As should be clear by now, the core puzzle that relationalized finance seeks to mitigate or resolve is actually an ontological and cosmological clash that takes place in everyday circumstances. It’s a struggle between different notions of value and meaning. It’s the glimmer of a worldview that steps away from many premises of liberal-capitalist-modernity. Does humanity consist chiefly of rational, self-interested individuals seeking material gain through market exchange, and exploiting nature as a (dwindling) resource that stands separate and apart from humans? This is the cosmology of contemporary finance.

Or does humanity consist of interdependent, cooperative individuals nested within collectives, which themselves are nested in complicated ways within an animate Earth of countless living beings engaged in a symbiotic, evolutionary dance? We need a finance in sync with this world.

Without some adaptation of conventional finance and its implicit cosmology, capitalist finance will continue to inflict harm on nature and communities. It will continue to financialize life-systems as assets, and in so doing, superimpose an alien matrix of value and extractive production on them. So a key goal here is to help commoners secure much greater equity and control over their shared wealth, and to help them avoid becoming beholden to distant investors, lenders, and state authorities with their own empire-building priorities.

What might a relationalized finance regime look like? It would be one version of a Bioregional Finance Facility (BFF), a breakthrough idea introduced by Samantha Power and Leon Seefeld in their pioneering book of that title.[40] A BFF is intended as a kind of bridge between the current finance paradigm and an ecologically minded economy on a bioregional scale. How exactly a BFF should be structured and managed remains something of an open question because there are so many practical challenges, if only because bioregions themselves are so varied.

We conclude, however, that there are deep tensions between conventional and progressive finance on the one hand, and the aspirations to protect and restore bioregions on the other hand. Modern finance cannot really comprehend nonpropertized, nonmonetized forms of value unless they are properly “coded” in dollars, numbers, and units of property. So to make investment or lending intelligible, the ontological realities of generative living systems – its value and meaning proposition – are de-natured and misrepresented.

Hence the conundrum: Dominant forms of finance tend to stymie or co-opt novel, emergent alternatives, casting them as impractical and marginal. And yet building effective alternatives that might render the current models obsolete (the R. Buckminster Fuller admonition[41]) has its own serious liabilities – a logic that conventional investors and lenders reject and a social coherence that is embryonic and culturally invisible to mainstream players, which of course limits the capacity of novel alternatives to grow.

Given the dismal history of “green finance” models in redirecting capital and catalyzing transformation (see p. 1 of essay), we believe the clear necessity is to create novel alternatives that can tap into social and local energies (commoning, cooperation, bioregioning) and grow viable new forms of finance in tandem with these movements. Bioregional players need the ability to borrow and receive “transvestment” from capitalist circuits of value, in order to establish stable new regimes of care, reciprocity, cooperation, and bioregional coherence.

We therefore propose a relationalized finance system that is able to direct funds to commoning and socio-ecological markets that work as stewards of generative living systems. To overcome the ontological clash of finance and ecosystems, we propose a simple but versatile entity that would serve as a buffer, or intermediary, between finance and commons. The buffer entity – a type of BFF that, in this instance would be a “regrantor group” -- would mitigate or neutralize the extractive ambitions of capital investment and lending so that funds would flow to stewards of the generative value of living systems.

The chart below illustrates a general scenario. Commoners, through their affective labor and care for a body of shared wealth (land, water, farms, buildings, parks, etc.), would act as stewards of living value. And businesses that agree to participate in quasi-bounded, stinted bioregional markets would have access to capital and lending. Under this scheme, a transfer of money is much more than a money-making transaction; it is an affirmation of the recipients’ shared commitments to commoning, bioregional markets, and the alternative theory of value (living systems as generative in nonmonetized, nonpropertized ways).

Money would flow through a “regrantor fund” that pools money from commoners themselves, friends and allies, and adjacent movements, augmented by money from crowdfunding, supportive businesses, philanthropies, and community foundations. The state, especially municipal and regional governments, could be potentially important sources of additional funding because their ostensible purpose is to protect and advance the common wealth (in all its forms, not just market value).

The regrantor fund would act as an independent, non-governmental buffer/intermediary, standing between funding sources and the commons. Its role would be to act as a central collector of funds to support bioregional work (a BFF), especially via commons, and to neutralize any direct, transactional demands on funding recipients.

Since the elders of the Commonsverse and bioregional community would be the trustees of the regrantor fund, the fund would be a vehicle for noncapitalist practitioners to exercise autonomous judgment and leadership, in resonance with peers to whom they are accountable. The larger terms of governance (how appointments are made, funding criteria, performance requirements, etc.) deserve more discussion, but in any instance would reflect local priorities, aspirations, and needs.

The idea of a regrantor fund is inspired by the many foundations associated with free and open source software projects, especially for software that is essential for the Internet and computer operating systems (GNU/Linux, Debian, Apache, Perl, etc.). These foundations typically accept funds from various donors (including Big Tech companies) to support their commoning to produce non-proprietary, shareable software. The foundations, governed by respected community practitioners, act as intermediaries to prevent transactional “purchases” of the community’s talents and to advance the community’s key priorities and projects.

The foundation-as-intermediary model upholds an essential pattern of commoning -- to “keep commoning and commerce distinct.”[42] This rule helps prevent business opportunities or sudden inflows of money from disrupting the social solidarity of the group. Obviously, securing money is always a temptation and often useful, but no commons will succeed unless it first cultivates a strong, committed culture of commoning. Strong relationships of trust, a shared purpose and ethic, community rituals, and a good reputation are bulwarks against market enclosures.

Seen in this larger social context, it becomes clear that a regrantor fund is not merely be a financial institution. It is a force for propagating the social logics of bioregionalism. It would champion a different value-creation regime: the power of living, intersubjective human and more-than-human lifeforms working in concert, with carefully peer-regulated market relationships. In everyday parlance: the fund would foster eco-stewardship through commoning and bounded, stinted markets. The fund would make capital allocation and funding decisions (for new infrastructures, startup experiments, software platforms, operational needs, public engagement, etc.). It would also host deliberations about strategic interventions and initiate public outreach as part of its mission to champion a bioregional transition.

While the regrantor fund would function as a Bioregional Finance Facility (BFF), not all BFFs would necessary embrace the regrantor fund idea as a tool to support generative living systems and commons on their own ontological terms. Green finance, for example, might be content to channel existing pools of capital to generically defined “green” projects, without attempting an OntoShift in finance itself. And they would probably continue to demand private extraction of economic value (perhaps in lesser ways) and control management and production practices from the outside.

While we focus on the idea of a regrantor fund here, there are other notable examples for allocating money in democratic, participatory ways (rather than investors or philanthropies retaining that authority for themselves). The Chorus Foundation has empowered Anchor Organizations in four regions (Alaska, eastern Kentucky, Richmond, California, and Buffalo, NY) to allocate funds to support a “just transition” from fossil fuels, with an accent on democratic governance, participatory budgeting, relationship-building between geographies and grantees.[43] A related model is “flow funding,” which eschews grant applications and bureaucracy in favor of grantmaking through social collaboration and trusted relationships. The essential purpose of flow funding is to empower grassroots players in a given bioregional to allocate resources themselves, relying on their direct, grounded knowledge of their challenges, without the paperwork and delays that often characterize conventional philanthropy. This approach “accelerates real impact, strengthens local economies, and ensures resources go directly where they are most needed.”[44]

As climate collapse grows more proximate, the frequent justification for retaining basic forms of existing finance (and philanthropy) is that “we don’t have enough time” to instigate serious changes through bottom-up, cultural means. What matters most is making massive, rapid shifts of capital to fund eco-revitalization, goes the argument. These are powerful arguments so far as they go. But the disappointing performance of so many capitalist-facing finance schemes over the decades does not inspire confidence, which leads us to conclude that failing to revamp the foundational premises of capitalist finance has its own significant liabilities and risks. Can we dare not to develop a new genre of noncapitalist finance?

Another objection is that bioregional or local approaches are “too small” to make a difference quickly enough. But one can argue that large-scale “solutions” have their own problems associated with their very scale. The higher ROI requirements and efficiencies of large, centralized projects summarily preclude consideration of a whole class of distributed solutions at smaller-scales, which, given proper support, could leverage nonmarket community energies in cost-efficient ways. In addition, large-scale mono-solutions are brittle; their centralization and rigid design templates reduce resilience.

It’s important to add that decentralizing power and innovation to localities (“subsidiarity”) is an important way to fight authoritarian state power and empower democratic practice and norms. In short, the profitability thresholds for large corporate projects entail many disabilities of their own.

While novel forms of capitalist finance surely have a role (and indeed, they remain the dominant vector of eco-financial innovation), let’s admit that the future of nature finance is not a binary proposition – capitalist or noncapitalist? Rather, it’s a matter of dynamic coexistence. Economist Kojin Karatani has noted that world history may be best understood not through modes of production, but through its modes of exchange: the reciprocity of gifts (clan society), ruling and protection (state society), commodity exchange (industrial capitalist society), and a fourth and future one that transcends the other three.[45] Our point for this discussion: the different modes of exchange driving eco-finance are not mutually exclusive. They can coexist simultaneously, but in varying degrees. We believe relationalized finance animated by the gift ethic, open source-style cooperation, social solidarity, community loyalties, and other attributes of commoning have a far greater potential than conventional finance can understand.

So while relationalized finance will certainly not displace capitalist finance, it has the capacity to introduce a very different, catalytic logic that can have far-reaching ramifications and influence. The wager being made by relationalized finance is that it could begin to displace Old Finance with stabilizing, satisfying new forms that reflect a new, emerging worldview and set of social practices.

Relationalized finance represents a bet that the factors that Old Finance regards as peripheral, will in fact come together to bring forth a new value-paradigm and Ecocene forms of finance. Old Finance will continue to cling to its perceived (but waning) base of power, capital-centric logic, its functional efficacy as a legacy system, and its worldview. The point of relationalized finance is to herald and enact a new Ecocene finance that catalyzes power-shifts in ontology, personal values, social relations, provisioning practices, and cosmic beliefs. It would both reflect and animate a new order that will far transcend finance alone.

Our very categories of thinking will evolve and mutate. While contributions to a regrantor fund might be characterized as “donations” or “subsidies,” the point of relationalized finance is to give new cultural meanings to such flows of money. It is frankly difficult to say whether giving money to build a new bioregionally resilient civilization should be seen as a donation, an investment, social redistribution of wealth, or empowerment for commoners in building a new socio-ecological-economic order. It is all of the above. Perhaps the social utility of potlatch – the Indigenous practice of tribal chiefs giving away their wealth to tribal members in showy displays of redistribution – may be a relevant concept.

One thing is clear: In a world that still inhabits the cultural mindset of capitalist finance, new ways of thinking about finance as a socio-political and ecological phenomenon are needed. New logics and meanings will take time to emerge. There is always the danger that Old Finance will use any new thought-categories and language as performative in any case -- emotive guises that enable Old Finance to maintain the basic structures of finance without truly recognizing the ontological character of living systems.

For this reason, we believe it’s important to talk about the transvestment of money from capitalist-circuits of value (monetized, propertized) to commons-stewarded realms of value (relational biophysical life). Transvestment occurs when funds circulating in capitalist markets are given to the regrantor fund, and then allocated to well-vetted commons and businesses in loosely bounded bioregional markets.

The term transvestment underscores that the transfer of money is executing a serious shift in the value-paradigm and bio-material practices. The money is not simply pursuing return on investment; it represents a commitment to a new order of a different character, one that is simultaneously an investment, gamble, donation, and solidarity statement in a political/cultural sense. Transvestment is not simply capitalist investment and lending in a freshly named extraction zone. It is an affirmation of the generative value of a coherent, organically integrated living system.

This reframing and shift of meaning for money transfers are important because conventional eco-finance fails to acknowledge the OntoShift that bioregioning requires. For example, biodiversity credits and carbon-offsets do not truly recognize the particular value of particular places. They assert the fiction that ecological harm inflicted in one place can be compensated for somewhere else, as if one landscape was essentially equivalent to all others. This is the danger, too, of “payment for ecosystem services” (PES) and KPIs (“key performance indicators”), which monetize ecological “services” and convert them into tradeable commodities. In effect, natural biodiversity (or healthy waterways or forests) are reconceived as “resources” that can be bought and sold in eco-mitigation markets.[46]

The term transvestment signals that money from capitalist circuits of value is in fact being re-purposed. It is not a purchased token of ownership or services, but enabling support for commons-based stewardship of a specific place. By supporting “stewardship support agreements” or “commons stewardship funding” (as the transfer might be named), transvestment signals a break from the Old Finance paradigm. It pierces the veil of eco-finance charades by conceding that such schemes “run fundamentally in opposition to the cosmovisions of many Indigenous Peoples and other communities, who understand Nature as our mother, not as a commodity,” as an environmental coalition put it.[47]

A regrantor group functioning as a BFF could help commons develop themselves while nonetheless existing in a capitalist society. Transvestment could give eco-stewards the freedom to pioneer qualitatively new types of production, governance, and eco-relationships. For example, CSA farms would be able to produce organic crops for local households without the costly markups, herbicides, and marketing expenses of industrial agriculture. Coastal fishers would be more able to harvest fish within the carrying capacity of the regional fishery while still making a living from the work. Software programmers would be able to develop network protocols and apps that could be open source, shareable, and respectful of user privacy and social needs. There would be no financial pressure for programmers to design code that maximizes user screen-time via anti-social algorithms and privacy-invasive data-surveillance.

The criteria for distributing regrantor funds would require careful thought, however, because relationalized finance operates from some very different socio-economic and ontological premises than conventional finance. The risk models of conventional finance presume a stable society, regulatory institutions, and economic growth, and the heft of finance history supports the prioritizing of exchange-value and private profit. But in a world of unpredictable disruptions, ecological decline, and social unrest, the very parameters for investment are likely to change. It could well be that a well-organized bioregional space with a coherent web of commons and bounded-business relationships would be a safer long-term investment.

On the other hand, it could be that only a noncapitalist finance could support what commons treat as primary – care-work over productivity; meeting basic needs for all rather than catering to the most profitable market demand (for those who have the money); and conscientious long-term eco-stewardship over short-term financial performance. In any case, it’s clear that a single set of performance metrics and a single bottom-line are inapt ways of assessing investment. For a regrantor group with an agenda that blends finance, bioregional vitality, and social coherence, there are currently too many unknown, interconnected, floating variables. Metrics for value-generated may be more properly applied to the entire socio-ecological system than any single borrower or investment asset run by a commons or business enterprise.

That said, there are some useful and necessary tools for evaluating the performance of projects. Peer certification is a process that convenes respected players in a given community of practice, and asks them to assess the internal participation, coordination, communications, trust, and efficacy of the project. The City of Barcelona has a Community Balance peer certification system for evaluating local community organizations.[48] Many agroecological farmers use a locally focused peer certification system, known as the Participatory Guarantee System (PGS).[49] This system certifies the qualifications and practices of producers based on the judgments of active, known, and trusted participants in the community. One virtue of peer certification is that it allows situated judgments and nuanced discernments by practitioners themselves, rather than relying on somewhat artificial, abstract, rigid standards that cannot be reliably applied.

The City of Amsterdam is currently exploring the development of a relationalized finance system. Its office for cooperatives and citizen participation has hosted a number of workshops and public presentations on the topic.[50] In Kingston, New York, a group of ordinary citizens has developed a participatory community fund, Kingston Common Futures, whose funding grants are made by ordinary people, not local business and political elites.[51] There is wider interest in the promise of relationalized finance and other fascinating experiments in finance, but there is not yet a focused field of inquiry or coordinated movement to move the ideas forward.

* * *

This essay is an invitation to take action. We hope to advance this process, first, through further discussion and debate about relationalized finance, so we welcome your comments and suggestions at the email addresses below.

In time, we hope to convene a small working group to help develop the ideas of this memo in greater depth. New strategic initiatives and pilot projects should be launched in collaboration with venturesome partners. As feasible, we hope to collaborate with existing bioregional initiatives, activist networks, relocalization projects, and municipalities to explore how relationalized finance might be organized in their circumstances. We hope you agree that there are many promising paths for developing independent, noncapitalist forms of finance.

This reality is seemingly confirmed by the experimentation and energy already underway in bioregional spaces, albeit in quite disaggregated and diverse ways. New seed-forms urgently need attention, collaborators, and funds if they are going to address unfolding climate disruptions and related ecological and social crises. Moving forward effectively requires clarity about the limits of conventional finance – and the creation of new finance vehicles that honor the deep complexities of commoning and ecosystems at bioregional scales.

David Bollier

Reinventing the Commons Program

Schumacher Center for a New Economics

david@bollier.org

Natasha Hulst

Coordinator, Land Commons Initiatives in Europe

Schumacher Center for a New Economics

natashahulst@centerforneweconomics.org.

December 8, 2025

NOTES

[40] Samatha Power and Leon Seefeld, Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet (Biofi Project, 2024) at [41] Fuller wrote: “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

[42] David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, ˆFree, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (New Society Publishers, 2019), pp. 151-155.

[43] Ben Roberts et al. and r3.0, Blueprint 8: Funding Governance for Systemic Transformation: Allocating investment and grant-making for a regenerative and distributive economy, September 2, 2022. See esp. pp. 68-77.

[44] Kinship Earth, Flow Funding: A Collaborative, Trust-Based Model of Giving, at

[45] Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange (Duke University Press, 2014).

[46] Fréderic Hache of the Green Finance Observatory skillfully dissects the fallacies of biodiversity offsets and credits in a report, noting, “These approaches fundamentally misunderstand the uniqueness and complexity of ecosystems, making the idea of substituting one ecosystem for another scientifically unsound and ethically questionable….[B]iodiversity credits are likely to be used almost entirely for offsetting rather than voluntary conservation, echoing the failures of carbon markets.” [47] Civil Society Statement on Biodiversity Offsets and Credits, October 2025, at [48] Gregorio Turolla, “A Focus on Barcelona’s Community Balance,” URBACT, February 20, 2020, at [49] IFOAM Organics International, at [50] Natasha Hulst, Annelies van Herwijnen, and David Bollier, “Building a Finance System for Thriving Commons in Amsterdam,” April 2024, working report at [51]

This is the fourth section of an essay, "Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions," by David Bollier and Natasha Hulst. The remaining section will be published tomorrow. The full essay can be downloaded as a PDF here. Previous sections appeared in sequence immediately before this one, at these links: Section 1. Introduction & Reframing the Economy Around Bioregioning; 2. Commons as Relational Provisioning and Governance; and 3. Toward a New Theory of Value (and Meaning): Living Systems as Generative.

4. Toward Socio-ecological Markets

If bioregions are going to become more economically self-reliant and culturally self-directed, they must be able to insulate themselves from the neocolonial workings of global finance and markets. This means that bioregions must be able to assert their own investment priorities and become more self-reliant by intensifying their intra-regional commerce. Their basic challenge is to fend off outside commercial control and extraction (while obviously continuing many commercial dealings) so that the regional economy can benefit from the “multiplier effect” of locally circulated money while ensuring strong ecological stewardship and regional identity and culture.

Without some deliberate strategies for consolidating market activity within bioregions – making enterprises more interdependent and regionally focused – the priorities of capitalist businesses and global capital will override regional eco-stewardship and self-determination. Attempts to build a coherent regional economy and identity will be subordinated to “free market” imperatives and everything they privilege

It is impossible to prescribe a single strategic template for addressing these issues, however. An agenda this broad, ambitious, and long-term will necessarily vary from one bioregion to another. That said, in conjunction with commons, bioregional market structures and strategies could prod commerce to become more place-committed and socially embedded. These bioregional strategies include:

A. Community-designed infrastructures for bioregional production. Community participation in creating and managing small, shared infrastructures can be catalytic for the bioregional economy in general (commercial, commons-based, social, ecological). Shared bioregional infrastructures can reduce overhead, transport, and retail costs. It can make essential services like WiFi access, solar energy, water systems, grain milling, information-sharing, and databases -- more accessible and shareable, all while strengthening social cohesion and bioregional identity.

B. Inalienable shared assets. Assuring that major bioregional assets like arable land, groundwater, housing, forests, and other “natural assets” remain inalienable – off-limits in perpetuity to private purchase – makes a bioregion more stable and secure. It prevents companies and private equity funds from acquiring essential infrastructure through which they would extract exorbitant rents, siphoning money away from the bioregion. Keeping shared assets inalienable also addresses social inequity by making essential equity assets free or lower-cost, and available in perpetuity. For example, groups like Agrarian Trust (US) and Terre de Liens (France) rely on community land trusts to make land inalienable and stewarded as commons, which has all sorts of salutary effects: farmland for a younger generation of farmers, reduced equity costs that enable organic, local agriculture, and meaningful long-term employment for local residents.

C. Bounded market structures and relationships. Food system expert Ken Meter, author of Building Community Food Webs, has spent his career bringing together farmers, suppliers, food processors, wholesalers, distributors, institutional food services, and restaurants as coherent regional “food webs.”[27] When disaggregated players are organized into interdependent networks of mutual commitment and commerce, a region benefits. It can insulate itself from the vagaries of national and global markets while also building regional identity and pride. Many experiments are underway to build more coordinated, integrated regional food systems.

D. Peer-organized governance of specific sectors. A group called “Float” -- funding lab for open agroecological technologies – is experimenting with “community-led innovation prioritization and resource allocation” among its network of agroecological farmers, technologies, researchers, and civil society players.[28] The project is a self-conscious attempt to build commons-based infrastructures, open source technologies (“good enough for now, safe enough to try”), and knowledge-sharing practices that can work at multiple, interconnected scales (farm, community, territory, ecosystem). Float’s community-based governance prototype suggests the promise of self-organized, independent regimes for bioregional governance.

E. “Stinted markets” to assure affordable access. The “stinting” of markets has a long history in medieval markets as a way to protect community interests, as Lewis Hyde explains in his book, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership.[29] Hyde reports that markets in the eighteenth century “could not operate without regard for the provisioning of commoners and the poor. Farmers, for example, were obliged to bring grain to market rather than sell it in the field to wholesalers, and markets themselves were fenced, as it were, so that speculators couldn’t outbid the poor.” The “orderly regulation of Preston market” in 1795 held that “none but the town’s people are permitted to buy during the first hour, which is from eight to nine in the morning…” In another town, writes Hyde, “’hucksters, higglers, and retailers’ were excluded in the morning until noon.”[30] Modern-day adaptations of this principle, as well as gleaning – the right to scavenge for crops left in the field after the harvest – could also be considered.

F. Complementary bioregional currencies. Place-based currencies have great promise as a way for communities to retain the economic value generated in a region, rather than allowing it to be siphoned off to big-city financial centers and private firms. Of course, it can take a lot of work to launch a bioregional currency that is used by a large and diverse enough group of businesses and consumers, in ways that engender trust and market exchange. Still, the idea has proven precedents. For example, the BerkShares in western Massachusetts, used by hundreds of businesses and thousands of consumers, amounts to a sophisticated buy-local program that distinguishes local businesses from their global counterparts and builds pride in Berkshire County-sourced goods and services.[31] There are many possible designs for bioregional currencies and token systems, but the goal is generally to privilege and intensify regional market exchange over that of undifferentiated national or international markets that extract value from a region rather than re-circulate it.

G. Mutual credits systems, timebanking, crowdfunding. At more modest scales, these vehicles for pooling money have shown their effectiveness. While each has different functional challenges, small scale mutual credit systems (regional, local and even neighborhood-based (see groups like Grassroots Economics Foundation in Kenya), mutual aid networks that operate timebanks, a service-barter system, and crowdfunding platforms for commons projects (see Goteo in Europe) offer worthy models. The challenge is to develop sufficient social commitment-pooling before the introduction of an exchange system so that people can prioritize shared community goals, and not simply revert to transactional, self-interested roles.

H. Common funds, aka ROSCAs. The informal pooling of money has a long tradition throughout history, most notably among women in Africa and the African diaspora. Social money-pooling, or a common fund, has many names – susu, partner, meeting-turn, box-hand, sol – but the practice is generically known to scholars as ROSCAs, an acronym for “rotating savings and credit associations.”[32] ROSCAs provide a way for people of color and modest means to take care of their financial needs (saving, borrowing, investment) when banking systems are unfriendly or unaffordable, often for racialized reasons. Such traditional systems of self-help could play an important role in bioregional finance, helping to integrate economic exchange with regional self-reliance.

I. Government procurement policies. State policy can be used to develop regional businesses channeling its large purchasing demand toward in-region vendors. Using state, regional, and local government purchasing to “buy local” could help any number of commercial sectors to grow and invigorate the bioregional economy.

J. Import-replacement strategies. The Schumacher Center for a New Economics has long advocated that regions develop “import replacement” strategies so that specific crops, goods, and services can be offered by “homegrown” independent businesses as possible, rather than depending on national and international businesses. The point is to foster greater regional self-reliance and an economic multiplier effect within the region, rather than losing that money to external businesses and financial institutions. Some players in the degrowth fashion movement are actively experimenting with designing fiber-growing and textile production as integrated bioregional systems. British activist Zoe Gilbertson of Liflad CIC has focused on how to grow flax and hemp bioregionally in the UK, as are groups like Fashion Act Now, OurCommon.Market, and open source textile processing company Fantasy Fibre Mill.

K. Community Wealth Building. The nonprofit Democracy Collaborative has developed a number of strategies to invigorate regional economies through “buy local” relationships, strengthening local businesses, and creating worker cooperatives. In cities like Cleveland, Ohio, and Preston, England, “anchor institutions” like universities and hospitals commit to purchasing goods and services locally, spurring shared economic prosperity, racial equity, ecological sustainability, and democratic ownership and control.[33]

L. Geographic indicators for bioregional products. When distinctive products are widely identified with a particular region, they are often able to get formal legal recognition through a kind of trademark-like protection known as “geographic indicators,” or GI. This legal form is a way to support businesses that produce distinctive, region-specific products such as wine, cheese, textiles, and meat such as Chablis, Champagne, Parma ham, and Kente fabric design. There is legitimate controversy over what types of product names should be considered generic, and the circumstances under which a region should be allowed to claim exclusive control over a name. That said, with appropriate safeguards (i.e., avoiding the privatization of existing generic names), there is a strong case to be made for developing bioregion-specific trade names to support those economies.

M. Local bio-based building materials. Without much fanfare, a number of experiments are underway to develop climate-friendly, hyperlocal building materials that can acceptably substitute (in terms of fire-resistance, moisture-control, etc.) for carbon-intensive modern synthetics. Examples include hemp, stray, clay, ecologically harvested timber and wood chips. While such materials hold great promise, they often require new design methods, construction procedures, commercial sourcing, building code reform, economic efficiencies, etc. – areas that deserve further exploration and development.[34]

N. Culture-led energy transitions. Although most energy-generation in industrialized countries is controlled from the top down via large utilities, energy companies, and the state, there is growing experimentation with decentralized legal regimes and tech innovation controlled by local and regional players. This is often driven more by local culture than by technology alone, a topic often studied under the term “energy humanities.”[35] In particular, countries like Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, and Ukraine (following the devastation of war) are finding it useful to support local energy-generation to unleash greater local self-determination, creativity, and system-resilience. The Danish island Samsø has become a model for self-sufficient renewable energy using wind, solar, and biomass, and will host a major conference in 2026 on localized energy.[36]

O. Support to democratize local ownership. The City of New York has a dedicated program to encourage the creation and financing of cooperatives. In the UK, the Centre for Democratic Business is strengthening localism through the “social club movement” as forces for social solidarity and collective investment. Innovative financial schemes such as “Exit to Community” are enabling privately held small businesses to sell to community members rather than to private investors through IPOs [Initial Public Offerings]. Michael Shuman, a leading expert on local economics and finance, believes that latent synergies among community banking, public finance, and crowdfunding are finally arriving, opening up new possibilities for Main Street investment.[37]

P. Cosmolocal production. A new stage of common-based peer production is known as “cosmo-local production,” an outgrowth of open source software that shares design and knowledge on a global scale, via the Internet, while enabling the production of physical equipment at local levels, using less expensive, modular components than conventional manufacturing. The system provides ways for farmers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and hobbyists to produce first-rate innovations without the burdens of carbon-intensive transport and proprietary corporate control and prices. Cosmo-local production techniques are currently being used for such varied things as furniture, farm equipment, motor vehicles, prosthetic limbs, and automated insulin-delivery pumps for people with diabetes.[38]

Q. Collaborations with Indigenous peoples. For obvious reasons Indigenous peoples have enormous contributions that they can make to bioregioning efforts – in resurrecting eco-cultural practices of the past, learning about the spirits and behaviors of more-than-human life, and forging shared commitments to restoration. For example, the Cascadia Department of Bioregion has worked with tribes in Canada to develop maps of Indigenous homelands – noting heritage orchards, fishing spots, bird colonies, ancient First Nation sites -- before colonial conquests had decimated them.[39] Such ecological, cultural, and practical knowledge offers importance guidance in developing a bioregional vision.

R. Bioregional festivals. The importance of nurturing a bioregional culture cannot be overstated. Besides promoting bioregional commons and markets, it’s valuable to host festivals to celebrate the culture through learning, exhibitions, and family fun. Pete Seeger’s famous Clearwater festivals on the Hudson River in New York State were an early example of this. Many communities already have festivals to celebrate local agriculture or signature fruits or vegetables. Expanding such efforts and giving them a bioregional focus – such as the Green Heart Festival planned for 2026 in The Netherlands – are important ways to popularize the challenges and enlist the support of a broader public.

How to pursue the above strategies? That, truly, is the work ahead. Brave, experimental, creative work is needed to develop functional, socially integrated initiatives and infrastructures. One overarching priority must be the nurturing of new modes of finance. We must move from a finance that demands private benefits at scale, as purely transactional and extractive, to finance systems grounded in particular places and cooperative relationships, all closely aligned with living systems.

NOTES

[27] Ken Meter, Building Community Food Webs (Island Press, 2021).

[28] [29] Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), p. 34.

[30] Hyde, p. 37.

[31] [32] Caroline Shenaz Hossein, The Banker Ladies: Vanguards of Solidarity Economics and Community-Based Banks (University of Toronto Press, 2024).

[33] Community Wealth Building project (Democracy Collaborative), at [34] See e.g., Autopoeiesis, at [35] [36] [37] Devin D. Thorpe and Jen Risley, “The Superpowers of Main Street," Main Street Journal, November 7, 2025, at [38] See, e.g., The Cosmolocal Reader at [39] Sheila Harrington, Julie Stevenson, et al. Islands in the Salish Sea: A Community Atlas (2025).