Malik, Anas

Can high-level religious injunctions to steward the ecological commons change norms and choices? This paper examines prominent recent religious efforts to mobilize their faith communities and others in the effort to preserve and regenerate the ecological commons. While speaking primarily to the Islamic and the Catholic contexts, there are implications and consequences for others. Al Mizan (The Balance: A Covenant for the Earth) is a Muslim document seeking to identify efforts to preserve and regenerate the ecological and social commons as a core moral imperative in keeping with the Quran. Laudato Si (Praise Be: On Care for Our Common Home) is Pope Francis’ widely distributed encyclical on duties to care for creation, and has been called a document of ecological economics. Both offer specific suggestions as well as general guidelines, and most prominently, amplify the urgency of action. This paper offers an analytic review of AlMizan in the context of previous well-platformed efforts at securing and reviving the social and ecological commons. It also offers comparison to Laudato Si, and considers variable scenarios of impacts. From an institutional analysis perspective, such efforts can supply meta-constitutional and constitutional level understandings for efforts among pietists to regenerate eco-social commons. They do this by overcoming information problems and enabling coordination. The decentralized nature of authority in the context of Islamic tradition raises challenges for dissemination and adoption. The Catholic context, while more hierarchical and centralized, nevertheless has faced challenges in generating impacts from Laudato Si. Both documents recognize the urgent need for changes to protect and regenerate the planetary ecological commons. Both offer hortatory religious declarations combined with analytic claims about the state of the commons to persuade and motivate faith communities. We are approaching the 10 year anniversary of Laudato Si, and about 2 years into Al Mizan, this paper also explores their existing impacts and remaining potential.

Faith-based approaches to project financing, particularly but not exclusively in the Islamic context, tend to refrain from the use of interest-bearing loans. This has implications for preserving and regenerating social and ecological commons. Equity finance is an established method of non-interest based financing. As a partnership based model, equity finance requires the passive investors have more “skin in the game”, often through community ties, and this reduces the likelihood of speculative bubbles of the sort associated with leverage. It adds important guardrails to project financing that can be sustainable development goals. Further, it adds a stewardship component that aligns well with the preservation and regeneration of ecological commons, as well as in promoting a type of social commons.

Faith-based financial initiatives seek to cohabit or compete with mainstream financial practices, under the banner of prohibition on interest. This paper presents a scalable framework for transcending interest-based financial systems through productive partnership models, synthesizing Islamic finance principles, Catholic social teaching, and modern enterprise risk management methodologies. Rather than confrontationally opposing existing financial structures, we propose a positive-sum transition pathway that aligns institutional risk management with social and ecological resilience.

The research explores how financial institutions can evolve toward equity-based partnership models that prioritize real value creation over extractive practices. Our analysis suggests these approaches can promote financial, social, and ecological outcomes that are desirable from the standpoint of stewardship and regeneration of ecological and social commons.

This paper has two parts. In the first, it presents a process for introducing equity finance models into an interest-based financial system. In the second, it presents a proposal for sustainable affordable housing in Canada using cooperative project financing and institutional arrangements for enabling the project to be perpetuated.