Festival of Commoning take two
Last week was the second Festival of Commoning. It was great last year, and this year we were back in Stroud for a bigger event (albeit one that was a bit less interactive). This year was also dual track, which meant Decisions as to what sessions to go to...
What follows are my fairly rough and possibly inaccurate notes of what struck me as most interesting in the sessions I attended.
This time we didn't really talk about why we were all there - what commoning was all about. This meant that Saturday night's stand-up comedians were baffled, and the audience contributions probably left things even more unclear. "Not anarchists, but anarchist inclusive" is perhaps as good as it got.
I'm minded to think it's great not to have too specific a definition, when there's some feeling of a movement starting or coalescing; but a complete absence of clarity wasn't helpful for some of the new folks. I had to look back at what I wrote last year:
What is a commons? It's infrastructure for a basic, decent existence, operated and owned outside the market, locally governed and managed by multiple stakeholders. (we also heard a 'more modern' definition from the work of David Bollier and others - "a pervasive, generative, and neglected social lifeform... complex, adaptive living processes that generate wealth (both tengible and intangible) through which people address their shared needs with minimal or no reliance on markets or states.") Diana Finch set out differences between co-ops and commons. Coops are businesses, in the market, based on trade or exchange, mediated by money, democratic in operation, and benefit their members. Commons are not businesses, and are based on sharing, with no money required; they are collaborative, and benefit both members and others. (As well as actual commons, there were quite a few commons-adjacent projects discussed at the Festival.)Definitely a spectrum of such commons/commonings this year too. We had people with different levels of experience and very different expectations of the event itself.
The first day opened with Collaborative Finance (#CoFi). This work is partly inspired because it always feels like there isn't enough money. They noted how many people have trauma around money and have made irrational decisions around it. For local money, they suggested just working out the difference at the end of the month to avoid cashflow risk for local businesses - a circle of exchange. One (mostly historical) example was building societies (saving pennies to build houses) - sadly now mostly turned into banks. Did their members really know what they were losing when they took the windfall? Probably many people didn't understand the difference between membership and shareholding, and so neoliberalism succeeded, and demutualsation was all around.The Fabian Society and Labour party wanted to centralise finance.
These days we see immigrant communities doing their own finance, pooling funds and risk. It seems like for UK folks you need to make a case of 'what's in it for me,' a self-interest argument, because it's hard to sell the benefits to the collective, now. It was easier in the past.
A critical factor is scale. You have to have the appropriate scale, and maybe that's harder these days, peopel have lost the folk memory that helped them with this. We still have mutual assurance in places like global shipping, though.
On to local exchange and trade systems. LETS Bristol was popular and then wound down in the 1990s (was it because of tax regulations?). In Liverpool, folks were thought to be active in the black economy, when in fact they were in a LETS. HMRC were generally happy as long as you didn't talk about it being money. Timebanking is an adjacent idea. Either way, you need both folks who can organise a new thing, and people who have the skills to keep an organisation going.
Wherever there was a LETS, they set up a Pound like the Brixton Pound - this sort of thing seemed sexier, got press coverage. But the Brixton Pound is now just a souvenir sold for money, not for exchange. LETS don't run on their own. And they need young people involved.
There was discussion about the level of debt in all parts of the economy, and that one old way to deal with this is the jubilee. Could we achieve something similar with some ecosystems change?
(There were some fairly heated comments at this stage - many different perspectives on what happened and why :)
Dil Green's session focused on governance (which I think he defined as how we approach the need for rules and structures, to deal with complexity). His main point was "the price of commoning is local politics." Unfortunately we've all got used to not needing to do the politics, except for 6 weeks every 4 years. The rest of the time people moan in the pub, and a few people maybe go on demos. So a lot of skill of working through practical politics (things like setting rents in a housing commons) has been lost. We're nervous of human scale politics because we are not used to arguing with our neighbours about meaningful things. When we do, maybe over a hedge, it gets nasty, and people jump to 'the law' to sort stuff out. Contrast that with a 50 house housing commons, where there's at least 48 other people who can help arbitrate. Now folks usually don't think they want to spend Saturday afternoon arguing about hedges, but that's the price to pay for better overall governance and the benefits of the commons. (Maybe this system leads to a bit more conformity? there has to be a decision on what a good hedge looks like. But giving up a little freedom is OK, we do that when we play sports or games with rules and a referee.). We can get better at these skills by practicing, doing things like sociocracy.
Ostrom's rules are no use unless you have social connections and fabric. People who get on with rough rules will outlast people who don't get on who have rigorous rules.
We're all experts at commoning - even a conversation at a bus stop is a commons. Even in the most dire circumstances, such as enslaved labour in the late 19th century, people made a culture, created work songs, etc. These are the skills of commoning. There's an element of creation, joy, play.
When we come together at a scale where we can't have personal relationships, we institutionalise. It's a sensible step to handle the increasing complexity. But institutions that are built larger and longer-lived than us often don't die when they should.
The cooperative movement started as liberatory, but now "it's all about rules, and the rules are a straitjacket." (the rules came because of government pressure in the late 19th century.)
Commons under attack from private equity need to institutionalise as a defensive move against encroachment. The challenge is that commons that build value get enclosed upon (like building societies). Need a "poison pill against enclosure" - the best way is by paying attention to how you institutionalise. A well governed commons needs a monitoring role.
Success requires having the right scale, and then the right systems for it. It will depend on how big the commons needs to be - in time, in space, in participation, in stakeholders. Different things need different scales - an electricity commons needs more than 2 houses, plus it needs expertise, resilience; a housing commons needs perhaps 50 households to make a meaningful setup. A personal transport commons will be different again - perhaps city scale, but what about travelling to other places? Maybe federation of commons... Dil mentioned examples of things having a natural scale, based on particular characteristics.
Institutions might seem like a bad thing, but they bring benefits. Even as a commons punk band in the 80s,the institutions of venues and a known format of a gig, were helpful. So was the institution of John Peel! An institution can be as little as a set of agreements. The agreements can evolve - that's still an institution.
We went onto how ownership is a weird concept. Isn't there just... the universe? It's also a recent concept. The Normans didn't own things, they had tenure. Freehold is still a freehold in law in England. People might talk about dissolving property rights - there's a village outside Stroud that all burned their title deeds and still self manage, years later. But that's not legal any more, everything is encoded in the Land Registry now, even if the deeds are burned. So there needs to be some institution for land commons. Community land trusts (CLTs) are a way to take ownership out of private hands, but the trustees have a high stress role, being equally and severally liable. Even if you re-engineer the trust to make it as democratic as possible, as Hastings Commons have done, it's a lot to ask of the trustees.
Dil is positive about growth - although not economic growth. Life happens and continues in all kinds of places, in the atmosphere above and down in the earth's crust. He mentioned that he wants to build things that people not at this conference will say 'that looks better than today' about.
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| Ecocycle diagram from the Liberating Structures session, reminding us that institutions and projects come and go, in a cycle |
With investment, you can save with a focus on ethics, or to make more money, and the overlap where you do both is quite small. It's probably getting smaller, as the making-money side is getting bigger faster than the ethical side. For instance, you can make 14% on big tech stocks, but maybe 6% if you are lucky on major solar projects.
So kin.coop are a non-profit co-op to help folks pool money. It's different regulations in different countries - in some places you can do this in Whatsapp. But in the UK, it's trickier, but you can do it without being a bank or emoney provider or a credit union, and that's what kin.coop are doing, acting like a fiscal host, approved by the FCA, and building the open source platform to power it. With a £1 donation you become a member, then it's groups pooling funds, you can create or join these. It sounded a nice idea although some of the practicalities didn't sound amazing - you use open banking to transfer money in, but they need an admin to manually move money out. The business model might scale - if scale is the intent. That bit was less clear.
They noted that the UK makes setting up some commons quite easy, as you can just clone the rules from the FCA site where they list all the mutuals. (In most jurisdictions you would want an 'apex co-op' to help you.)
The panel discussion on Friday night got somewhat spiky. Indy Johar as usual brought many left-field ideas and approaches.
The omnicrisis, the polycrisis, is not a bounded commons problem - it's a problem of unbounded common goods, like climate breakdown. Ostrom only researched bounded commons. Look at Mondragón operating in India in the same extractive way as McKinsey, with the same prices. Such co-op rules don't fix everything, they are designed for boundaries and for 'othering'.
The system with a boundary demands a godlike view of the world, not a relational view. We need more agentic and self-aware things in our systems if we want systems change. It's a meta problem, and we've killed a lot of our systems - they are dead things.
Take timber - you need an economy of stewardship to manage it for 500 years, not 50. You can't be in consumption mode if you need 500 years for timber to sequester carbon - it's a responsibility to steward carbon for 500 years. When you design a house, it's not form follows function - it's design for health, energy generation, etc. You're designing an entangled multi-solving thing.
The High Line in New York cost $130m USD but created $10bn in land value rise. That's private value created by common goods. You could covenant all the land near the High Line to pay a 10% uplift amount and that would have paid for the construction. There's an economy rooted in common good investments that we're not unlocking.
Can we build a self-owning house? Indy will try over the next 2 years. Self-owning things can break the problem paradox. Self-owning not for independence, but conscious interdependence - agentic interdependency of human and non-human systems. And do this in a theory of partial knowing. Doubt, tenderness, care, tentativeness are all intrinsic to the partial knowing. We have to recognise that we cannot achieve a godlike view of all things - and so we need to design systems that can cope with uncertainty and doubt.
Bruce White from the Organisation for Identity and Cultural Development spoke about polarisation due to large-scale divisive propaganda over 20 years - it's a worldwide phenomenon. Identity-based disinformation (IBD) narrows the target's identity, and others other identities - so the countermeasure has to widen the target's own identity again. So, IBD targetting, say, Russian men, might frame Russian men as macho fighters with wives and kids to protect (narrowing the identity); and then frames Ukrainian men as weak and gay. The narrowing of target identity is as important, because otherwise you might see similarities with the 'other side'. It's nothing like fake news. Bruce mentioned oicd.net/resources where there's also tools you can use to understand what's happening regionally.
Claire Mellier from ISWE.org said it's not a crisis of democracy but a crisis of capitalism. The French 2019 assembly about climate, using sortition across all of France, identified financialisation and growth as the heart of the problem - even before they had heard any expert views. She's exploring participatory communities of practice and whether they're opening up or closing down climate things, comparing French and UK assemblies. Examples of frustration with current democratic systems and capitalism exist with billionaire taxes, AI etc, not just climate. How we talk about stuff matters - and the commons may be more engaging than postgrowth or degrowth ideas.
Dil Green addressed the skepticism around viability of collaboratively building novel things that are resistant to being co-opted. His experience of active collaboration includes decoupling small business (which is a lot of the economy) from the monetary system, and buying houses without debt with a novel credit instrument (rent credit voucher). "We don't want to run finance systems or housing... but we're convinced that we have to show that something can be built." We need to seed a new political economy built on commons.
Indy's River Dôn project is not a static thing - the commons is weaving a continual renegotiation around reality and shifting desires, needs or stakeholders. The harder problem of managing public goods is only possible through public ethics - people feeling a need to behave prosocially, pro-biosphere, in a context where the cost of cheating doesn't come back on them.
Indy had 3 key points. Firstly, that we're entering an age of degenerative volatility. The state will become more authoritarian (because it pools risk). This is important to know, because the liberal left have often seen the state as salvation, but it's not going to be our friend. The rise of the civic state is more critical than ever. We should be aware of the agenda of defence that we're not adequately thinking or talking about.
Secondly, the rise of the sovereign citizen movement - citizens who believe the state is non-legitimate, like the recent US killings of police. Keep this thought alongside the above one.
Third point: we talk about changing the narrative, but the right has successfully constructed a psychogeography of the world in which we are systematically precarious. Welfare and governance have taken similar approaches, for instance instrumentalising people not providing welfare. Design for precarity is the economic imperative. Precariousness also means being fragile because of fear, so fear becomes the predominant means of being. Today's narratives are easily weaponised. We need to shift the psychic geography of the nation "so we can dream again."
Another worry about the growth and degrowth conversation: if we go to a zero growth story (which we're already in), then the only means of redistribution in the current system is rooted in violence. With a massively unequal world, the degrowth narrative is just problematic. How can I create an alliance around climate risk in the long term, when some of the people present are hungry today, suffering an existential risk today?
People with extreme wealth (defined by Indy as $500m+) realise there's no isolation that helps them survive mutually assured destruction. They know this. The New Zealand bunker thing gives you a little longer and a different death. We must choose between mutually assured thriving, or mutually assured destruction. In the pandemic, New Zealand had no paracetamol production, no ventilators. Isolationism is no defence. There are no islands of coherence - the violence and volatility means coherence won't survive, so islands of coherence won't matter.
At even greater levels of wealth, above 500million, you're non-divisibly entangled with the world. These people now believe 98% of their wealth will be wiped out in the next 30 years, so they see the entanglement, they are not as isolated. All the fear and precarity is systematic. So we need to do the deep systems work too.
Dil referred to https://equilibriabook.com/ where there's a state in which everyone gets strong first-mover disadvantage even when everyone wants change - leading to "institutional interlock." What we need is more people who can trust, do the process, have resilience, respond to uncertainty, cope with uncertainty. We need more people practicing the political labour to make commons real. If we acheived a political economy of the commons, we'd each be in many commons at different scales. So there's less 'us vs them".
Claire said it's actually a crisis of spirituality, crisis of self, and we need more personal development - seeing beyond the self, stopping the othering. When did you last hear from someone in your community who you disagree with but still respected and moved forward with?
Do we just need to take this news about the commons and what commons could do, out to the world? People are desperate for good news. Dil was cautious here, and gave examples of famous "beacons of hope" in the commons space, that are almost totally insignificant or even dodgy. His focus is on building carefully so when we break cover, what we talk about is something that has in it the power to develop, to self-fund etc. Show not tell.
What can we do about the degenerate baseline plus volatility situation? More resources are going to security - so many resources: cognitive security, water security etc. Security is not a bounded logic, it's a systems logic. There are bounded things you can solve, and there are tangled things, like if we lose the Amazon we're all pretty much dead. That's security. There'll be a whole new thesis around security economics - food, water, minerals, waste disposal even, cognitive security. That might be a place to create the next economy. It'll be a great reallocation of resource. It will be about stability, in a new way though. Today, the fight in the UK is being won by large-scale industrial manufacturing and large scale industrial farmers today, providing present-day security. Can we redirect the spend to the foundations of the type of economy we're talking about? A new narrative, a new political basis, a different type of seriousness to drive stability into a world systematically more volatile. That can be done in the current paradigm.
The audience questions were a mixed bag...
How to engage working class in participatory activities? Pay for time, travel, childcare etc - but that doesn't let them set the agenda. Maybe legislative theatre is one route. Participatory budgeting. There may be other ways.
Indy said that "life wants to live" (it's a Jurassic Park quote). There is a fork between futures, the thriving or destruction. We will choose to live. The question is when we will make the choice.
He reminded us of Lovelock's ideas. The planet used internal energy (fossils) to fuel growth of life to 8.5bn people; the planet is now self-aware; on a planetary horizon it's becoming conscious; and a new type of entangled consciousness can jump from competitive extractive systems to entangled ones. There's a great opportunity in the universe.
Kids struggle when hope isn't visible. In today's young people, we are building a 'Joker generation' that wants to burn down everything because it's not theirs and never will be. Deep pathways of hope need to be built.
Our pronouns should be "we them" - reflect our complex selfhood.
In response to a question, which I think was about whether a panel Q&A was collaborative enough, perhaps the session should be more participatory and that the group in the room should be collaborating...
Indy pointed out that there's loads of things happening to tackle the polycrisis - examples such as Madrid planning for cooling for when there's an 8°C rise, work to bring in better governance for Antarctica, etc. We don't need to collaborate. Stuff is happening. Not everything is a problem that will be solved with sticky notes. That sort of method just doesn't work at the resolution Indy works at. Madrid needs billions of euros to make change. New legal and financial stuff needs different ways of working. Open spaces don't cut it. (This was a great point - and highlighted the different perspectives in the room, and the different things people thought the Festival was for.)
How do you do open many-to-many organising at large scale? There are ways, but it's different. Decisions are flows not objects. You get the participation in the flow. Consider Antarctic as planetary object; every fishing community is a stakeholder, because they depend on Antarctic-powered ecosystems. In many ways we are all stakeholders. We need new litigation and new governance.
Chris Cook kicked off day 2. He had some fascinating tales from a varied career, covering mutual assurance for shipping through protection and indemnity clubs, market making (including emissions trading, which Chris called "an insane idea"), early digitisation, whistleblowing, cohousing through LLPs (a great way to get things financed without borrowing), Denmark's 'natural grid' for power... It was all perhaps a bit more than could fit clearly into the session. He's working on 'nondominium' - a structure for 4 stakeholders (the users, the custodian of the commons, the investors, and the service provider). It works a bit like an asset lock, not an organisation but an agreement. He linked this back to the shipping example, and more recently the Star and Garter pub in Linlithgow. The most important thing in the agreement is how it will end. Another interesting example was James Watt's original engine, which was 2.5% efficient. This sounds terrible but was an improvement, and he asked to be paid a third of the coal that was saved. That was a nice deal for all concerned, and as the goal was at the price it was delivered to Cornwall for the tin mines, it was a great amount of money for Watt. Chris also talked about thermal power, that is too easily forgotten. (Thermal doesn't need conventional funding which means older collaborative finance methods can be used.) For instance, Linlithgow had a viable plan to take heat from the sewers.
Chris wrapped up with the current state of things, which he described as both peak debt (solvency crisis, a bit like the financial crash which led to quantitative easing) and peak rent (liquidity crisis). It's going to be a different kind of 'jubilee' needed to sort this all out, because of this being all about information businesses, so lots of non-rivalrous knowledge and know-how and know-who, rather than physical assets.
Adam Greenfield talked mostly about ideas from his book Lifehouse. He noted that 'we are all doing anarchism' (by working outside the state or market) and recommended Solnit's Paradise Built in Hell. A very pointed question noted that the mutual aid Adam described at length is basically the sort of thing women everywhere have done forever; maybe this is just a 'hack' to enable men to frame something about themselves, in a way that permits them to enact care.
Andy Goldring from the Permaculture Association described their ethics = earth care, people care, fair shares. Their theory of practice is rooted in design, and they are an anarchist self-organising group, with ecological and ethical principles. The association is all of us, not just staff and board. He's the ED but didn't want the title. Yes, they are also a charity but lots of scope for accountability (he doesn't use that term, but it's what I understood). It was interesting to hear how they blend being a charity, with anarchism, I'd quite like to learn more about that.
Can permaculture plus commoning become a new operating system that enables people and communities to respond and adapt to the ecological, social and climate emergencies? He thinks yes. He has the commonsnetwork.org definition:
The Buddhist Five Remembrances are important. Abbreviated, they say: we will grow old, die, have ill health, lose all we love; our only continuance is our thoughts, words and deeds.
He's working on the Ecological Citizens Network - a 5-year research project with Wrexham and other universities. How can we make regenerative agriculture courses sexy, and have better learning pathways? Is there a wealth transfer opportunity around baby boomers, how do we do that and manage it well?Pam Warhurst from Incredible Edible gave an inspiring high energy talk. Incredible Edible started in 2007 in Todmorden, a grassroots effort for folks who struggle with the big organisations and the ideas like permaculture. it's just for people who eat.
She doesn't know how many Incredible Edibles there are. They don't count. They just give a simple story and people do stuff, take action. (This 'not counting' reminds me of some of my thoughts on the makerspace world - that the more effort goes into counting, the less actually gets done.)
Pam's background is in politics and it shows with a wisdom of approach. She noted that grassroots demands, and kindness, is what will move the political world; there's loads of statistics and reports already. So she's focussed on a kinder framework. Telling stories that are so understandable that the powers that be are the 'other hand' clapping. Just grow and share food, create meaningful jobs, have more markets.
She was frustrated after the Rio summit. "Think global act local" - where did it all go? Decades later, and we are not there. So, she was on a train and wrote on a napkin. "It was a Virgin serviette so I had to keep it very simple". Just 3 spinning plates: let's just grow veg in a public space, and plant where you live.
It's propaganda gardening, it's theatre, to get people talking about food. Many people just don't know. They picked corn before it was ripe so they made a traffic light labelling scheme to say when it was good to pick. They aren't trying to feed the whole town. They are just trying to get people to think, we can grow. We could grow in our gardens but then people don't see it. The people who don't want to grow, you get them cooking the food. They've rocked up on streets, shown people how to cook. The basics, how to make a potato cake, how to cook with lentils.
Working with volunteers can be tricky - they wanted the council to offer apprenticeships instead.
There's institutional challenges to community growing. Limited land access; fragmented council policy and ambiguous responsibilities; it ends up low priority, and then we get the disconnect of community growing from wider food, nature and climate policies. All the stuff about insurance for instance sounds expensive, and that's if they've not just said no. It puts people off.
So, now there's a 'right to grow' campaign at Westminster. They have pro bono barristers, some influential people to hold the amendment. They knew it wouldn't go anywhere but it got attention, got in Hansard, and got agreement across parties, because it was just a basic human thing. And then across the North they started to talk to councils.
It has worked. Different places approach it all differently. In Glasgow they planted wheelbarrows that could be moved. In Hove, the council worked out that they already had insurance for people who fell over on grass, and so it extended to edibles. So they don't need separate insurance now.
So authorities started to get keen on repurposing the public realm, but it's all too slow; Incredible Edible are working to amplify and spread it, because politicians love a big idea. A "great Northern greenhouse" - coast to coast, Liverpool to Hull. They will work with the local authorities but are not waiting for them. The impact on communities is clear - better health, better mental health, wildlife corridors.
How do they cope with people who "just trash it"? That happens less than people think. You just replant. Engage local schools; be kind. At the end of the day it was just some rhubarb. You can replant.
It takes patience, it can take a long time to build momentum. If you still have a permissions-based culture where you have to ask someone, it's not 'right to grow'.
What about dog walkers and dog poo? In one example they did a fun event with activities, willow sculptures, paths. It got the locals engaged and then people respected the growing land, dogs didn't go on it. Some people will be naughty but most people get it. Now, if it was an official council thing, maybe it's different; but folks respect when it's just other people.
How do you find out if land is public land? Start with what you know, don't try to map the whole area. Walk the streets, draw what you see. If you need to talk to the council talk to public health or community development; don't talk to Parks, highways, or estates management, they will say no.
And don't work with universities; they have lots of information, but suck up a lot of money.
Take lots of pictures. Show how you make it better.
Marcus Saul works on IslandPower, and the International Resilience Network. He's worked to get the right power in different places, for instance mobile generation, heating, cooling. You can have temporary power systems for ships in dock, more efficient than running the ship power.
In refugee camps you need the right amount of power. But no one wants the cost, so you end up with very small power generation, and you end up with scavenging of power and folks looking for things to burn etc. Then the black economy. An energy currency can enable a cottage economy so folks want to stay, and the burden on the local community is reduced.
The opportunity is around waste - 88% efficiency from point of production to point of consumption. Crypto has a $4tn cap today. Waste energy is worth $4.2tn today, through losses in systems inefficiency. This all gets worse in the future, even with electrification planned.
So there's opportunities to be smart. Create an energy ledger, get mutually assured data (not just about electricity but heat etc too), and use the ledger to spot inefficiencies. You can create a ledger for a street or town, the energy in, energy out, energy used, and how you want to use it. Then there's legal designs - like Nondominium above, or financial designs such as Environmental Credit Obligations, or new partnership models.
If you don't count the energy savings correctly you don't really solve the problem. The more local the energy, the more savings.
Small islands are a great place to explore this. They are literal islands! For instance it looks like Alderney has great power systems, but each hotel room has only 1 socket to ration usage. Too often, island projects work on grants, that come in, are executed with minimal costs, then the grant is used up and no one cares any more. But with energy modelling and maybe a local energy currency you can do better.
Today you buy the wind turbine with debt. A better model is more like leasing the turbine. The equipment provider provides the turbine in exchange for a flow of the energy. You're incentivising efficiency in install and maintenance. Equipment manufacturers can avoid costs in this model, like business development, adn they're embedded in local community. The turbine could run for 5-10 years, it's paid for itself, then give a fresh one that's more efficient and push the old one to a market that's ok with that. People are prepaying, so that means you also save 40% debt financing cost.
There was a brief discussion about UK energy companies who might be part of such projects; EnergyLocal, CoopEnergy are ok, but Octopus (despite some green vibes) is not good at sharing or collaborating.
They are developing the software behind the energy ledger.On to land access in Wales. Tirpontypridd.org was a lockdown project. A nearby effort took 10-15 years to get to access to woodland, so the team wanted to start an org that could purchase land as it came to market. They went on a journey: 2020-2025 were an unincorporated small community group - basic insurance, bank, website. February 2025 became a Community Benefit Society, FCA reg, HMRC reg (this set up means you get a charity number but no Charity Commission regulation pain - gives a tax exemption), more policies.
They had the usual ratio of interest/effort: across a town of 30k households, 100 said they were interested, and 5 showed up.
They use MemberMojo platform to do member stuff, there's no fee until 50 people. It's a paying membership model and they aim to be the entity who can buy the local woodland when the auction is next week, whilst the community sort out their thing. Land auctions move fast.
Ugandan visitors saw the cost of living crisis as a land access crisis - all that land around the town, why are they not growing food?
There was a quarry example - local community had no say in it. The Minister for Climate Change in Wales decided the quarry should go ahead and cited the Wellbeing Act in that decision. There's a need to change things here.
Land ownership is strange. Just 0.6% of population own more than 50% of land in rural England and Wales (a mix of rich people, churches, insurers etc). If the Crown gets the land, for whatever reason, they sell it on again.
People try to access land using different approaches: influence policy, influence planning, access the public realm, meanwhile leases, short-term leases, short tenancies, asset transfers, lease, co-production with public bodies, purchase land on open market... That purchasing is the focus of this project.
We went on to a different example, of large scale commercial forestry, no land access, clear-cut on 40-year cycle, meaning it created no local jobs or income. This was state-owned land, run by Natural Resources Wales. A campaign called "Welcome to Our Woods" org wanted more control over the forestry. Inspired by Scotland. After trying various approaches, they tried co-production, a citizens panel, bringing in witnesses rather than experts. They used professional facilitators to ensure the community held some power. This work created a 100-year vision, and agreed mixed continuous cover rather than clearfelling, plus land access, events, wildlife. The community focus was on values, values in relationship to the land. Why did the landowner come to the table for this? Because of political power, built from community disenfranchisement including over other issues. It took 12 meetings over 12 months, built mutual trust.
4CG Cardigan started with the purchase of a car park from the local store. They charged for the community car park and no one minded paying! They manage the loos, did some community planting, hosted a farmers market. They now own multiple properties in the town because they started focusing on things that would generate income.
One of the learnings from all these examples was that it's hard to get a grant when you don't know what you want, and so you don't have the outcomes and business model all set out. And of course things can change anyway, around housing, food etc. So it's good to find other ways. THey are looking at doughnut economics for pricing structures.
Being two tracks, I missed a lot too! People said that the Hastings Commons session was inspiring (they have brought over 8,500 square metres of floor space into custodian ownership across a whole cluster of buildings); and that Jem Bendell's talk was great. I'll have to watch out for the recordings...
There were some interesting corridor chats. I learned about bioregions, and a move to get foundations to invest in community projects - a smaller return, but retaining capital (this struck me as an interesting contrast to the movement to get foundations to spend down and close down).
If you feel inspired to support the Festival, there's a kin.coop space to donate, as it sounds like this year was heavily subsidised by some of the organisers. You need to create an account, then join the group: https://kin.coop/member/group/1762