Bollier, David

While the commons is often seen as the collective management of resources, it is instructive to see commons as dynamic social organisms engaged in symbiotic relationships with other living systems. This helps situate commons within an animate Earth and reveal the role of inner, subjective agency — feelings and cognition — in the stewardship of commons. The revised, updated edition of my 2014 book Think Like a Commoner surveys a broad array of contemporary, digital, traditional, and Indigenous commons to show how recurrent patterns of commoning play out in diverse contexts — local communities, urban life, digital networks, and ecological landscapes, among others. Inevitably, effective commons become entangled in the complications of political economy, state power, law, and capitalist norms, which require commons to learn how to prevent market enclosures and protect the generative power of their commoning.

In Amsterdam, commons initiatives are generating significant social, ecological, and economic value by addressing essential needs that markets and the state often fail to meet effectively. These endeavours, from community gardens to shared childcare and public space management, prioritize community well-being over profit while at the same time avoiding bureaucratic complexities. As commons gain momentum, offering localized solutions to pressing needs, the City of Amsterdam explored ways to support this movement. As commons face a major funding gap, as traditional finance structures are misaligned with their principles of collaborative governance, ecological care, and long-term communal benefit.

This presentation introduces relationalized finance, a new funding model developed by the Schumacher Center for New Economics and proposed by AmsterDOEN, the City of Amsterdam's action program for commons. This model emphasizes transvestment. An important concept in supporting this alternative theory of value – “living systems as generative” – is transvestment. This term refers to the deliberate transfer of money from conventional capitalist circuits of wealth-creation into commons-based circuits of value having a different character. Unlike conventional financial arrangements, which prioritize investor returns, relationalized finance functions as a social partnership or covenant, rooted in an ongoing commitment to supporting the diverse, often unmarketable value that commons produce.

Through transvestment, relationalized finance addresses the unique needs of commons by facilitating long-term stewardship, community cohesion, and mutual aid. It fosters investments that enable commons to operate autonomously, with a focus on creating sustainable, human-centered networks of care and responsibility. This model is not charity or “do-gooding” but a strategic investment in resilience and ecological health, offering an alternative to the extractive nature of traditional markets and bypassing the rigidities of state-driven support.

Relationalized finance and transvestment together provide a framework for redirecting resources into initiatives that regenerate community life, creating a financial ecosystem that values the commons' holistic contributions over immediate profit. This presentation will explore how this innovative approach, as envisioned by the Schumacher Center and championed by AmsterDOEN, can empower Amsterdam’s commons movement, strengthen their role as agents of positive social change, and serve as a replicable model for cities seeking to foster resilien

Learning to see commons as relational social systems, and not primarily as creatures of property law and standard economics, can help us understand how commons arise and maintain themselves. In this panel, David Bollier and Johannes Euler will cohost a discussion about the ""patterns of commoning,"" a framework developed by Bollier and Silke Helfrich in their 2019 book, 'Free, Fair and Alive.'

Inspired by Christopher Alexander's methodology for creating ""pattern languages,"" 'Free, Fair and Alive' identified more than twenty-five patterns of social, economic and governance practices that animate and sustain commons. The patterns are not a universal blueprint, but rather a flexible meta-template that names intersubjective experiences and dynamics of commoning while taking account of unique histories, landscapes, and other contextual factors. This approach to commoning is useful in explaining how relational dynamics are creative and resilient, helping to generate diverse forms of (mostly nonmarket) value.

The panel will also introduce a deck of oversized ""playing cards"" depicting more than thirty patterns of commoning that have been identified to date. The cards are used to help people reflect on the governance and provisioning practices of their commons, and as didactic tools for helping people learn about commoning.
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