[P2P-F] A Global New Deal For The Commons:

[Michel Bauwens]

HERE IS JOSEPH CEDERWALL'S PROPOSAL:
A Global New Deal For The Commons:

https://thedig.nz/editorial/hope-for-nature-a-new-deal-for-the-commons/?

I propose that what humanity and the planet desperately needs is a Global
New Deal For The Commons. Such a deal would require a global mobilisation
to ensure that the natural and cultural commons are protected and
sustainable biodiversity-friendly and cooperatist land-use is adopted. If
structured right, such a deal would have a massive impact towards restoring
the planetary ecosystem and biodiversity, as well as healing deprived and
hopeless communities everywhere in the process.

To truly turn the biodiversity and climate crises around, this new deal
needs to happen at least on a scale of wartime efforts such as the Marshall
Plan of WWII or the New Deal of the Depression-era. As Rutger Bregman
argues, centralised state action will be essential to any realistic efforts
to drive an environmental effort on the scale required. However, I am less
cynical than Bregman about the power of bottom-up efforts, and believe a
properly balanced combination of the two is essential.

A biodiversity-focused investment on this scale could combine central
investment with an approach focused on catalysing, fostering, and scaling
bottom-up land-use initiatives and ideas. It could prioritise local
communities as workforces and support the emergence of ground-up,
decentralised solutions and initiatives over centrally imposed or
market-based solutions wherever possible.

Such a new deal for the commons would require associated work on reforming
land tenure and local democratic and economic institutions on a scale not
attempted since the communist project. However, rather than the top-down
command and control approach of communism, it would provide a framework,
resources and tools for communities to re-learn how to live harmoniously
with each other and with nature’s abundance. This approach could spread
knowledge, technology and best practice for environmental restoration
globally through open sourcing IP and implementing solidarity networks or
networks of mutual aid across society.

This new deal would also require real action on the national and global
level to reform global governance and regulation and build a more just
international order and institutions. This would require new agreements
such as an international law of “ecocide,” and strengthened international
environmental laws and enforcement mechanisms to ensure the compliance of
corporations and rogue imperialist nations. This new order would also need
to address debt-enslavement, eternal growth imperatives, and rebalance
global wealth disparity to stop wealthy nations from shifting the impacts
of growth onto vulnerable populations and ecosystems.

However, crucially, to bring about this new order, we must find ways to
continue challenging the narrow confines of permitted thought and debate
keeping us locked in the destructive dominion paradigm. It would need to
restore the rule of law and ensure the protection of whistleblowers,
journalists, activists and politicians challenging this narrative. If not,
who will hold power accountable for their inaction or blocking of real
progress? Who will continue to tell the stories and defend the rights of
those on the margins building the alternative futures discussed above?"

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