The "Commoning Europe" project aims to rediscovery the Public Good as the foundation of Europe. Public and private still exist as the two indisputable poles of economic and social organization and forms of property. Both in debates on economic policy and on systemic alternatives, it seems there is nothing between these two poles, or at least so it appeared until the recent rediscovery of the theme of common goods both in economic theory and in political debate. We deliberately stress the term rediscovery because actually the forms of property and management based on common property pre-date those founded on the notion of public and private. “Commoning” refers to initiatives concerning material or immaterial resources shared among a community of users who determine by themselves the rules on management, use, enrichment of their resource; it is also based on a set of collaborative and contributive practices. This movement is now experiencing a boom in Europe. Such initiatives are often carried out by private organizations (associations, informal communities, etc.) designated as "commoners". Although they often emerge without elected representatives and public administrations, they must nevertheless find support and legitimacy with them to continue. A growing number of local governments are also seeking to develop approaches around the commons. The project intends to investigate different approaches to the commons at European level, in terms of relations between Commoners and Public Institutions and in relation to overcoming legal, organizational and other difficulties. The project partners, together with the applying organisation “Biblioteca di pace” (Italy), are the public bodies of Campi Bisenzio (Italy), Fagaras (Romania) and Ankara (Turkey) and the non-governmental organisations BRAL (Belgie) and Open UP (NL). They will share good practices in their respective territories and will attend thematic training courses/study visits to: - Strengthen the capacities of public officials and commoners to grasp the question of the commons and build together virtuous synergies. - Build an exchange platform between the partners to take advantage of the complementarity of their approaches, and with their European peers to develop their innovation capacity and contribute to a European deployment of the commons movement. About 14/15 members from each partner organization will participate directly in the project, for a total of about 85 people. These will be people who are particularly interested in the topic for research reasons or because they are directly involved in the ongoing experiences. To these will be added indirect participants, members of associated partners, citizens and public officials involved in the training activities, which will be three altogether, in Fagaras, Campi Bisenzio, Utrecht. The number of indirect participants can be defined at the end of the project, however the involvement of about 100 people can be expected during the 24 months of the project development. The project comprises 4 physical Transnational Partners' Meeting. Participants in the Meetings will be coordinators from each partner organization, with previous experience in the coordination/implementation of international projects. There are also three Short-term joint staff training events, useful to allow partners to know personally and on the spot the activities in progress involving Commoning and, also, to organize an exchange of information between those who - both public administrators and officials and ordinary citizens - are directly involved in the experiences. Methodology to be used in carrying out the project will be based on analysis and study of ongoing experiences on the subject of Commoning; learning will take place through discussions, with participatory techniques and methods. In this type of training, the exchange of roles is very interesting, since each participant - depending on their skills and experiences - is alternately a person who teaches and a person who learns. As part of the training, visits to significant ongoing experiences are also planned, in which the participants will be able to speak directly with the managers of the various activities. The desired impact will be a reinforcement for political decision makers who already support ongoing experiences in this context. They will be more motivated and legitimated to share project results with the public administrators of the territory, driving them to rethink any attitudes of distrust or lack of understanding towards requests by groups of citizens or associations. Meetings and debates on the theme, in areas outside the strict limits of the partnership, can help to change the idea that Common Goods are only a matter of ‘good policy’ or ‘good’ citizenship, creating a new cultural model leading to introducing into the legislation of the states a new kind of property, alongside the two traditional ones of ‘public’ and ‘private’.
- strengthen awareness of the theme of the commons among officials and administrators from each participating country, with the aim of identifying critical issues that cut across different situations; - provide an opportunity for administrators and people involved in the third sector to see good working practices, discuss problems of all kinds (cultural, financial, legal) and share solutions; - develop a common vocabulary, to be shared and implemented with other EU member countries, and a digital platform in which to share insights on the good practices collected; - promote discussion and learning, including through participatory techniques and methods; - build information gathering systems co-designed by partners (interviews, videos, reports); - provide lasting impact by fostering the 'application of the principles of shared administration by public agencies in their local context; - strengthen social cohesion and active citizenship and counter all forms of social exclusion.
"Commons" are a growing grassroots phenomenon in Europe, in which citizens share in the self-management and care of tangible or intangible assets, taking direct democratic responsibility not only for themselves but also for the community and future generations. We are living in a historical moment of extreme fluidity, and new individual and collective needs are emerging, leading to a proliferation of experiments in different contexts of active citizenship, to which institutions are slow to respond. Self-organized communities and individual citizens are challenging overly rigid public/private spheres, unable to contain the diversity of management and protection models. Many of these experiments involve neglected or underutilized public goods. Commons offer many benefits: a sustainable approach to resources, social resilience, education for fully responsible citizenship, and drastic reduction of all kinds of waste. Commons break the polarization between individual isolation in the global flow and exclusionary "identity" cultures: people of all backgrounds find identity and inclusion in open communities where they are recognized for their value, and this also helps to effectively counter all forms of racism and xenophobia and improve the quality of everyday life. Commons arise from below and cannot be created from above: they are more a living experience of "commoning" than places or things. Common goods, however, struggle to find their place in administrative structures based on the "public/private" dichotomy; citizens and public administrations, even when they are in favor of these experiences, have a confused life. Based on these general considerations, the organizations in the partnership (three from the third sector and three public administrations) found it necessary to carry out activities to train their staff, provide inspiration through the exchange of good practices between countries, and worked on building materials to train others working in the field or citizens who wish to engage for a common good. There is also a lack of awareness among those who already experience a common good, a lack of a shared vocabulary, and a lack of clear and lasting European directives on this area. The partnership has been working in this direction.