Principle: Communities must be encouraged to cultivate and produce their own livelihoods and co-govern their utilities, services and resources, in relational dynamics that foster self-realization and adaptation.
Emergence: A variety of innovative, creative small and local initiatives and projects are actively pursuing alternative and more sustainable forms of agriculture, industrial production, social and economic organization, currencies and credit systems, education, (self-)governance, and ways of life. At the edge we find the collaborative and P2P economy.
Amplificators: Communities, groups and individuals develop a sense of ownership of the process, a sense of immediacy and transparency, of shared destiny and emotional experience that foster trust and resilience, and a shared 'commons sense'. Local collaboration and peer to peer (P2P) dependencies are something graspable and immediate, and also expand awareness of what empowers one another and larger systems, creating channels by which they can discover opportunity and be brought into balance.
Positive feedback: Continual community learning about how those regional systems work should be encouraged and supported. This is key to sustaining the complexity of larger scales of integration, and the specialization of remote services that empowers them. Then trust, co-creation and co-governance practice and working skills develop at each scale, and so also spread to the whole in a distributed manner. This encourages conflict resolution and transparency approaches. It develops a sense of enduring responsibility for the commons and roles shared with future generations.
Coordinated Regional Emergency Interventions
Application: An immediate application would be to promote the use and testing of these innovative methods and initiatives in ‘innovation zones’ established in areas damaged by disasters, or to reverse damage caused by past and current practice. Promote the study of how interventions affect each scale of the systems they take place in. Responding to the threats of disasters, cultural and technological dislocations, as a need to develop resiliency and adaptability, and so also anticipating, avoiding and allowing more effective response, should all be be encouraged and funded, now aimed at making the commons work more smoothly as a whole too. Projects directly aimed at relieving the growth of crippling debt without continued growth of demands on the earth are inseparable from reducing emissions, reversing desertification, soil erosion, deforestation, overfishing, increased disparity between rich and poor, corruption, abuse of power.