This interview with David Bollier—author, activist, and leading commons scholar—offers accessible entry into the political economy of commons-based systems as alternatives to both market capitalism and state control. Bollier articulates how commons governance transcends the presumed dichotomy between private property and public ownership, showing how communities worldwide manage shared resources through participatory stewardship that prioritizes collective wellbeing over individual accumulation. Rather than accepting scarcity as natural condition requiring competitive markets, Bollier demonstrates how commons create abundance through cooperation, challenging fundamental assumptions about human nature and economic organization. The interview synthesizes decades of commons research and practice into frameworks directly applicable to contemporary questions about digital governance, platform cooperatives, and regenerative economics.
Key Highlights
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Commons as Alternative Economic Paradigm: Bollier positions commons not as romantic alternative but as proven economic model operating globally—from community forests to digital platforms—that generates value through cooperation rather than competition. This reframes commons from marginal exceptions to viable foundation for economic reorganization beyond capitalism’s extractive logic.
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Challenging Scarcity Mindsets: The interview explores how market ideology manufactures scarcity to justify competitive hoarding, while commons governance often creates abundance through sharing. Digital commons exemplify this starkly—knowledge shared becomes more valuable, while artificial scarcity (copyright, paywalls) depletes collective capacity for individual profit.
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Commoning as Verb: Bollier emphasizes “commoning”—the active social practices of creating and governing commons—over “commons” as noun. This shift highlights that shared resource management requires ongoing relationship, negotiation, and adaptation rather than static rules, focusing attention on social processes that enable cooperation across difference.
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Beyond Market and State: The political economy Bollier describes offers “third way” distinct from both privatization and nationalization. Commons governance distributes stewardship among those affected by resources, combining collective ownership with participatory management—neither controlled by profit-seeking corporations nor distant bureaucracies.
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Power and Enclosure: Bollier addresses how powerful interests enclose commons—privatizing shared resources from land to knowledge to culture—requiring active political struggle to defend and expand commons. This power-aware analysis connects historical enclosures to contemporary platform capitalism’s extraction of user-generated value.
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Digital Commons Potential: The interview explores how digital technologies enable new commons forms while also threatening enclosure at unprecedented scale. Bollier shows how blockchain, platform cooperatives, and open-source movements can serve commons or extraction depending on governance design and power distribution.
Practical Applications
Bollier’s framework enables commons-based approaches across contexts:
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Community organizations can use commons governance principles to manage shared resources—from land trusts to tool libraries to knowledge platforms—creating alternatives to both privatization and state control through participatory stewardship
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Platform developers can apply commoning practices when designing digital infrastructure, ensuring that user-generated value serves collective benefit rather than being extracted by investors through participatory governance that gives communities voice in platform evolution
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Policy advocates can reference Bollier’s work when arguing for legal frameworks supporting commons, showing that effective resource management doesn’t require choosing between free markets and government control but can emerge through community stewardship with appropriate institutional support
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Economic justice organizers can draw on commons political economy to articulate alternatives to capitalism that aren’t merely state socialism, demonstrating how cooperative resource governance has functioned successfully across cultures and contexts
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DAO designers can study commons governance patterns when creating blockchain-based coordination systems, learning from centuries of commons practice about participatory decision-making, conflict resolution, and preventing power concentration
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Researchers can build on Bollier’s synthesis to study how digital commons differ from physical resource commons, understanding what aspects of traditional commons governance translate to digital contexts and what requires new approaches
Connection With SuperBenefit
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Bollier’s commons political economy provides theoretical foundation for SuperBenefit’s regenerative economics work, showing how shared resource stewardship can create abundance through cooperation rather than scarcity through competition—directly challenging the assumption that economic coordination requires market mechanisms or centralized control, validating exploration of coordination primitives that serve collective benefit over individual accumulation.
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The emphasis on “commoning” as active social practice rather than static governance structure resonates with SuperBenefit’s understanding that coordination tools must serve relationship-building and adaptation rather than replacing human judgment with automated rules, suggesting that effective DAO primitives enable ongoing negotiation and emergence rather than merely encoding predetermined procedures.
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Bollier’s power-aware analysis of enclosure helps SuperBenefit recognize when Web3 coordination tools risk privatizing previously shared resources through protocol control and platform extraction, informing the commitment to commons stewardship and ensuring that DAO governance serves collective ownership rather than merely redistributing who captures value while maintaining extractive structures.
Related Concepts
- Commons - Shared resources and governance approaches
- Governance - Decision-making for collective resources
- Coordination - Mechanisms for managing shared resources
- Sustainability - Long-term resource stewardship
- Community - Groups managing commons together