Riding on the so-called “Deliberative Wave”(OECD, 2020), wealthy Western democracies, like the country of Luxembourg, are increasingly experimenting with the use of deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) such as Citizen’ Assemblies (CA) in state-led policy-making processes at various levels of public government. These spaces can be considered “invited spaces” (Miraftab, 2004) of participation controlled by the state and are often promoted as an exclusive prerogative, not to say duty, of citizenship. As a counter-practice, “invented spaces” of participation operate outside the official governance structures of the state, often within spaces that we might identify as the commons and are more directly connected with the everyday lives of people and their communities. While scholarship on “insurgency” (Holston, 1998, 2008; Miraftab, 2004, 2009; Sandercock & Lyssiotis, 2003) has emphasized the movement between “invited” and “invented” spaces, they have been inadequate in considering the ways in which these spaces are more fluidly shaping each other. So, the question is: How do invited and invented spaces co-constitute each other across commons-public thresholds? And what does that suggest for imagining public-commons partnerships? In this paper I argue that public-commons partnerships can be considered within a “commons-public-entanglement” as formalisations of everyday encounters with the law with(-in) the commons. Thinking with Lefebvre’s everydayness (Lefebvre et al., 2014/1947) and de Certeau’s tactics of the everyday (de Certeau, 1984/1974), I propose that the notion of “everyday law”, as it has been explored more extensively within the more transdisciplinary branches of legal geography (See Kymäläinen, 2024), might offer a helpful lens to understand public-commons relationships, and I discuss the potential need of a methodological shift informed by post humanist and new materialist philosophies for the study of the commons-public-entanglement. I present the arguments through a set of examples from the context of Southern Luxembourg, focusing on civil society organisations and unregistered community initiatives that actively engage with the regeneration of the socio-ecological fabric of the region in the context of its historical industrial extractive mining and steel production landscapes and current neoliberal state-led transition agenda.
