Blau, Jill Philine

Ostrom (1990) has focused on what principles commoners tend to require in order to succeed and be sustainable. More recent research has started to identify patterns of commoning that include “how” people work/ are together (Bollier & Helfrich 2019). Bollier and Helfrich (2019) have focused on how commoning is mainly about the maintenance of relationships. It is in this context they have identified different ways of what I call “working togetherness” such sociocracy and consent. While Habermann (2024:15) highlights how “commoning means taking care in common of the needs of life, and/ or reproducing them” and offers a theoretical analysis of the intersection of commoning and exploitation from an intersectional perspective, empirical analyses on the nexus between collective ways of working and caring from an intersectional perspective are still missing. In this article, I explore commoners’ reflections on their “working togetherness”; including potentials and also limitations on intersectional and just transformations - and how those moving within commoning spaces feel about them in terms of their creation of fair(er) relationships. The basis of these findings is a growing data set on commoners in and around Berlin, Germany.