What is Commoning?
Commoning is the verb—the active practice of collectively managing, maintaining, and creating shared resources through participatory governance. Unlike “the commons” (the resources themselves), commoning refers to the social practices, relationships, and ethical commitments through which communities steward resources together. It is “creating and maintaining something collectively” (Michel Bauwens), involving cooperative governance, care ethics, value production, and sometimes defense of shared wealth against enclosure. Commoning encompasses everything from managing community forests and water systems to co-creating open-source software, alternative currencies, and digital knowledge repositories.
Origins & Lineage
The practice of commoning is ancient and global, though the term itself is contemporary. Historically, commons referred to shared agricultural fields, grazing lands, and forests in medieval England that were collectively managed by communities. The term derives from traditional English legal designations for common land. Between approximately 1500 and 1850, the English Enclosure Acts forcibly converted these common lands into private property, eliminating traditional commoning practices and displacing peasant communities—a process that generated centuries of resistance and shaped modern capitalism’s relationship to shared resources.
The contemporary resurgence of commons discourse emerged after Garrett Hardin’s controversial 1968 article “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which argued that shared resources inevitably lead to overuse and degradation. Political economist Elinor Ostrom fundamentally challenged this thesis in her 1990 landmark work Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Through empirical study of over 800 cases worldwide, Ostrom demonstrated that communities successfully manage common pool resources through self-organized governance systems. She received the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for this work—the first woman to win the prize.
Since the 1990s, scholars and activists including David Bollier, Silke Helfrich, Peter Linebaugh, Silvia Federici, and Massimo De Angelis have expanded the concept beyond natural resources to encompass digital commons, urban commons, knowledge commons, and cultural commons. They emphasize commoning as a practice-based approach that distinguishes commons from both state-controlled public goods and market-based private property. Recent scholarship conceptualizes commoning as a dynamic social process that creates commons, rather than commons being a fixed category of goods.
How It’s Practiced
Commoning manifests through diverse social practices that share core principles: participatory governance, collective care, cooperative production, and ethical relationality. Participants—called commoners—negotiate rules, share knowledge, make decisions horizontally, and take collective responsibility for resources.
In material commons, this might involve community members managing irrigation systems, forests, or fisheries through negotiated use agreements and monitoring. In urban contexts, commoning includes community gardens, housing cooperatives, tool libraries, and time-banking networks. Digital commoning encompasses collaborative production of open-source software, Wikipedia editing, creative commons licensing, and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.
Crucially, commoning is not merely resource management but relationship-building. It involves what Ostrom identified as design principles: clearly defined boundaries, participatory rule-making, monitoring by community members, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution mechanisms, and nested governance structures. Contemporary commoning often emphasizes prefigurative politics—embodying in present practice the values and social relations desired in a future society.
Commoning Today
Conscious and spiritual communities increasingly recognize commoning as both practical organizing strategy and philosophical framework. Commoning appears in eco-village governance structures, intentional community land trusts, regenerative agriculture networks, and solidarity economy projects. Practitioners encounter commoning through community land trusts that remove land from speculative markets; mutual aid networks that pool care resources; open-source ecology projects; and bioregional movements that reconnect human communities with watershed ecosystems.
Several organizations now offer education in commoning principles: the School of Commoning provides frameworks for collective practice; the Commons Strategies Group documents and supports international commons movements; and academic programs like the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis (founded by Ostrom) conduct ongoing commons research. Books like David Bollier’s Think Like a Commoner (2014) and Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (2019, with Helfrich) have become foundational texts for those exploring commoning as alternative to capitalist and statist models.
Within spiritual and degrowth movements, commoning is recognized as practice that shifts consciousness from “me to we” and challenges capitalist growth imperatives. It connects to indigenous sovereignty movements, particularly as indigenous communities assert traditional commoning practices against ongoing land enclosures.
Common Misconceptions
Commoning is not the same as open access or public ownership. Open access means anyone can use a resource without restriction; commons have defined communities of users who participate in governance. Public ownership typically means state control with top-down management; commoning involves community self-governance.
Commoning is not inherently utopian or conflict-free. Real commons exist in tension with market pressures and state power, and internal conflicts over use, boundaries, and decision-making are normal. Not all commons succeed; many fail due to external pressures, internal discord, or inability to adapt to changing conditions.
Commoning is not simply “sharing” in a casual sense. It requires ongoing negotiation, governance structures, ethical commitments, and active participation. It is also not primarily about efficiency or productivity—it centers care, relationships, and collective well-being over extraction and accumulation.
The concept should not be romanticized as purely harmonious. Feminist scholar Silvia Federici warns that historical commons often reflected patriarchal structures, with women’s reproductive labor taken for granted. Contemporary commoning must consciously address power dynamics around gender, race, and class.
How to Begin
Begin by identifying existing commons you already participate in—from shared housing decisions to collaborative projects to local co-ops. Notice the social practices that make these function: how decisions get made, how conflicts resolve, how care gets distributed.
For theoretical foundation, read David Bollier’s Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons (2014, revised 2025) or Elinor Ostrom’s accessible synthesis articles on commons governance. The anthology Patterns of Commoning (2015, edited by Bollier and Helfrich) offers fifty concrete examples worldwide.
Practically, join or initiate a local commons: community gardens, tool libraries, time banks, housing cooperatives, or open-source projects. Organizations like the Commons Strategies Group and School of Commoning offer frameworks and peer learning. Look for degrowth networks, solidarity economy groups, and community land trusts in your region.
Approach commoning as both inner and outer work—it requires shifting from individualist to relational consciousness while simultaneously building collective governance practices. As practitioners emphasize, commoning is not a blueprint but a living process of learning to provision, govern, and care together.