Peer2Politics

How will agriculture have to change if we are going to successfully navigate past Peak Oil and address climate change? A new film documentary, Voices of Transition, provides plenty of answers from Transition-oriented farmers in France, Great Britain and Cuba.

How can we construct a right to a healthy and clean environment that is enforceable in today’s complex international legal order? What legal construct would be visionary and ambitious enough to meet the urgent need for environmental justice and protection and at the same time be enforceable in court rather than fall into the category of ‘soft law’?

The following is an interview with Soma Kishore Parthasarathy from the website of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) on June 6. The interviewer was Ana Abelenda, and the piece is called “Reclaiming the Commons for Gender and Economic Justice:  Struggles and Movements in India.”  It is republished here with permission.

Here’s a very special treat. Originally published on Guerrilla Translation, Movimiento por la Democracia´s “Charter for Democracy” stands out as premier example of citizen-led solution making to the various crises we face. It is a constitution for the commons written by commons.

The IASC Commons (International Association for the Study of Commons) has released a series of six short, artfully produced videos, “Commons in Action,” that amount to short advertisements for important commons projects.

We’ve recently featured Coopfunding, an Open-Sourced crowdfunding platform designed to “…promote the financing of projects with a social, self managed and cooperative nature.”  Today we present a guest article by Enric Duran, one of the developers behind Coopfunding and its parent-project, the Catalan Integral Cooperative, explaining the reasons that led to the creation of Coopfunding. This article was originally published inRadi.MS

With so much scholarship focused on commons as “resource management” and the measurement of externals, it’s refreshing to encounter a book that plumbs the internaldimensions of a commons –that is, commoning.  Canadian writer and scholar Heather Menzies has taken on this challenge in her recently published Reclaiming the Commons for the Commons Good (New Society Publishers), a book that she describes as a “memoir and manifesto.”  It is a three-part exploration of commoning as a personal experience, social negotiation and finally, as a spiritual quest.

“The power and effectiveness of people working together through connection and collaboration … taking responsibility individually and collectively rather than relying on traditional hierarchical status.”