Instituting Commoning

programs groups,

Commoning as Differentiated Publicness, Spring 2015, pp. 21-34 16 To understand the liberating aspect of self-instituting, we will take a look (back) at some remarkable examples from the early urban commons movement of more than a century ago, and at how such institutions were formed. This will bring us to a more Although at first glance the management element may look like the most obvious and almost technical aspect of communing, it actually may be its most defining and political aspect rather than the neutral category it easily presupposes. 2 In the course of this article, we will therefore explore the background to the notion of management itself, and consider how certain forms of management are inscribed in the more conventional understanding of commons, especially as stated in Elinor Ostrom's research on Common-Pool Resources. 3 We will call these the 'institutions of the commons', or as Ostrom calls them 'institutions for collective action '. 4 The paper then looks at the forms of management required to achieve what Stavros Stavrides calls 'liberated commoning', discussed later in this text.
This not only puts us on a path to new forms of institutions, but also to new forms of 'institutioning': in other words, both the act of self-instituting (selforganising) and self-institutionalising a community around certain commons, including the actual forms of governance this takes in relation to the community and its resources.

STEALTH.Unlimited (Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen)
22 for optimal use. However close this may come to forms of stewardship, Bavington warns that this management as 'careful use' is highly connected to management as control because it requires the pre-existence of a relatively controlled material or symbolic environment before it can take place.
The confusion around the word manager -which entered the English language in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries and encompasses both the meaning of trainer (menaggiare) and custodian (ménager) -still exists today.
These two etymologic roots may leave many contemporary commoners rather in despair.
Understandably, some larger or less formalised structure or mechanism to mediate a common resource is necessary -the institution -but the form of cooperation inscribed in these two forms of management leaves little space for the more tangential, emergent form of institutioning that many people seek today. Bavington goes on to explain that in the early seventeenth century, this meaning of management was influenced by the introduction into English of the French word ménager, which has its roots in housekeeping and means a 'mode of careful usage', which is possible once something is stripped of its wildness, complexity and uncertainty and prepared While it is essential to acknowledge the importance of Ostrom's research, and particularly the design principles for their clarity of concept, the resulting commoning institution has a quite stratified character. One should, however, keep in mind that it is based on findings resulting from often long-term functioning, natural common-pool-resource types of practices, and hence in mainly rural settings When we manage as coping we are the ones being controlled or carefully used by someone or something.
Managing, in the sense of dealing with and coping with uncertainty and complexity, is now a dominant theme in resource and environmental management and in contemporary life in general. 8 Shortly, we will see how this relates to concepts such as liminal practices, as explored by the architect and theoretician Stavros Stavrides. But first, we will take a look at the very influential definitions drafted by political economist Elinor Ostrom regarding the management of common resources.

Beyond the boundaries of a blueprint
In the summary of her book, Governing The on the outside. This makes the right of access, or the right to benefit from a specific common, highly problematic: What we are promoting is a kind of tribalism. It is a kind of anarchy. If that's the policy -I am ok with that.
But, if we are not proposing anarchy, then we have to understand that the management of a common has to be connected to the right of citizenship, and to the rights of the constitution. I do not have an answer to this, but to me it is the biggest problem to You need constantly to be alert in avoiding that this process solidifies and closes itself and therefore reverses its meaning. If commoning tends to close itself in a closed society and community, and it defines its own world, with certain classifications and rules of conduct, then commoning reverses itself and simply becomes the area of a public which reflects a certain authority that is created in order to keep this order going as a strict and circumscribed order. Commoning that is not in a flux reverses its meaning. 11 Here, the notion of liberated communing as a 'practice through which commoning invents, creates and, by itself, creates its own institutions, its own forms' is essential. 12 It is evident that such a definition of the institutions of commoning drifts away from the strict demarcation of a community and its set of rules, and goes beyond the governing of a resource per se as the earlier Ostrom definition envisioned.
When it comes to 'institutioning' commons, Saki modes of governing we enable around a resource.
At first sight, the prospect of profoundly changing  In recent years, with help from the initiators of Pogon, Rojc has seen a transition towards civil public co-management, which the users first devised in the