Commons
Trusts
While social charters ensure a broad political foundation for
the co-governance and co-production of common property regimes, they do not
make them operational. That requires the
development of commons trusts, which establish the specific legal conditions
for people to help each other manage and produce what each of them needs. Land and forest trusts are familiar examples.
Commons
trusts are institutions, usually involving both physical and financial assets,
which preserve and manage resources inherited from past generations on behalf
of present and future generations.
By definition, commons trusts are the only fiduciary institutions
accountable for the long-term preservation and sustenance of a resource. That’s because neither of our existing
property regimes —private nor public—have a mandate to provide fair access and
long-term protection for critical resources. Under its current operational
rules and institutions, state capitalism has forsaken such long-term fiscal
responsibility by neglecting to keep the actual value of the commons separate
from the mainstream economy. This commingling of accounts is why, under
the present system, the private and public sectors are spending both the
‘principal’ and the ‘interest’ of the commons—leading to currency
volatility and boom-bust cycles, and contributing enormously to the planet’s
ecological, energy and political instability.
The creation of commons trusts allows the private and public
sectors to continue to focus on profit, investment and budgetary
appropriations, while the commons becomes a primary means of stabilizing the
principal of commons reserves to maintain the diversity and sustainability of
the overall economy. Commons trustees
have two functions. First, they have a
responsibility to decide what proportion of their commons resources should be
monetized by renting them to the private sector for extraction and
production. A percentage of this
resource rent would then be distributed to citizens by the state as dividends
(or used for other purposes such as maintenance of the commons goods which are
being rented, or mitigation of the negative effects of renting these
goods).
Commons trusts thus guarantee that those who are unprotected have
rights to basic sustenance from their own resources. Yet the needs of present
beneficiaries are a secondary responsibility.
The primary obligation of trust managers is to keep the value created
through the commons within the commons to the extent possible, so that the
community can hold in reserve the larger portion of its natural, genetic, and
material stock for the benefit of people and species yet unborn, while
generating cultural, social and intellectual capital for current
generations. In this way, the harmful
effects of state capitalism are rebalanced: private industry flourishes from
the surplus resources which are rented from commons trusts, the socially
marginalized and vulnerable receive a subsistence income from the state, and
the primary assets of the commons are preserved and regenerated. This dynamic equilibrium is achieved through
new temporal modalities in the system of multilateral co-governance and
co-production introduced through the creation of commons trusts across the
world.
In this emerging multilateral system, the financial
incentives of businesses and government continue to operate as before. But the difference now is that the long-term
wealth guaranteed by commons trusts is not generated through the potential
financial revenue of the commons assets they are managing. Instead of regarding these commons as a
source of profit, commons trusts determine their intrinsic worth (the actual
value of passing on what we have inherited to future generations and allowing
this stock to be replenished and restored) through the full participatory
choice of citizens on whether or not to spend this commons capital. Commons trusts thus create a new time
signature based on the preservation of commons resources and the resilience of
the system that manages and produces them—not on the assets of the commons that
may have financial value in the marketplace.
Hence, long-term wealth arises, not through consumer demand, investment
or capital accumulation, but in the enhancement of the carrying capacity of the
global commons to support life and life systems, expressed through sustainable
choice.
Broadly speaking, the creation of local commons trusts
worldwide entails three significant changes:
• government shifts its primary emphasis from issuing
corporate charters and licensing the private sector to approving social
charters and open licenses for resource preservation and cultural and social
production through commons trusts
• commons trusts exercise a fiduciary duty to preserve
natural, genetic and material commons but can decide to rent a proportion of
these resource rights to businesses
• businesses may rent the rights to extract and produce a
resource from a commons trust, creating profits and positive externalities through
innovation, competitive products and services, and adjustment of the market to
the actual costs of resources
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