In the face of current systemic crises — climate crisis, housing crisis, rising food prices, health system crisis, depletion of natural resources, failures in public transport, algorithmic capitalism, etc. — recourse to the market leads us to a dead end. But the welfare state does not seem able to manage the ambient disturbances either. Faced with this dilemma, how will we feed ourselves, house ourselves, take care of ourselves, move around?
We must explore new avenues and create new collective imaginations. Above all, we must support the effervescence of citizen initiatives and struggles that are multiplying in Quebec and around the world. How can we transform our institutions to recognize the right of communities to organize themselves to meet pressing social needs?
We believe that a “society of the commons” would embody a new social project, a new social contract between communities and institutions. It is a question of allowing groups of inhabitants to take care of, produce, share and decide together on the goods and services necessary for their development.
The commons are defined as an institution comprising three elements: a resource (the commons), a community (the commoners) and a set of social rules and practices (communalization or commoning). The commons thus allow a group of people to produce together and collectively manage the goods, services or activities they need. Examples of commons include community forests, reclaimed public buildings (like Building 7), self-managed cooperatives (housing, for example), knowledge commons like Wikipedia, etc.
Several initiatives openly claim commons throughout the world. In Latin America, popular pharmacies are gaining ground in Chile, where municipalism is used as a springboard for collective initiatives. In Mexico, the Santo Domingo neighborhood was created following an occupation in México and the collective Zapatista movement has many followers in Chiapas.
In Europe, there is the sustainability model of the Barcelona commons, which has allowed the creation of cooperatives such as Som Mobilitat and Som Energia to respond in a self-managed and sustainable way to the needs of mobility and energy consumption. Bologna has set up a Charter of urban commons to rethink the role of local government as a host infrastructure for self-organized commons.
In Quebec, although they do not always use the vocabulary of the “commons”, several initiatives are part of this logic. Whether we think of the exit of nearly 400 housing units from the speculative market by an NPO in Drummondville, the proposal for sustainable farms for Quebec based on trusts, cooperatives and NPOs, or even citizen mobilization to protect a landlocked wooded area in the east of Montreal. In Métis-sur-Mer, a public-collective partnership was set up in 2023 to build an affordable eco-district thanks to a 35-year agreement between the municipality and the CMētis organization.
Other initiatives explicitly claim their desire to create commons, such as the Transition en commun initiative, which sets up an alliance between citizens, the City of Montreal and civil society, with the objective of socio-ecological transition in the neighbourhoods. There is also the organization Project collective which recently launched the digital platform encommun.io, or the CRITIC, a research collective on the initiatives, transformations and institutions of the commons.
The “Quebec model” 2.0
Quebec has a long tradition of social economy and self-management. Think of the Caisses Populaires Desjardins and the agricultural cooperatives launched at the beginning of the 20e century, or the community clinics and self-managed daycare centers of the 1960s and 1970s. These were then institutionalized in the form of CLSCs and CPEs to become key components of the “Québec model”.
However, the universalization of services by the public authorities has often been accompanied by professionalization and centralization. Indeed, many Quebec commons have been “statized” or “bureaucratized” over time.
The social economy now represents approximately 10% of Quebec’s GDP, but is struggling to exceed this ceiling and transform our economic model in depth. The commons extend solidarity beyond the social economy by creating bridges with community circles, citizen initiatives, social struggles and socio-ecological transition projects. They make it possible to repoliticize the social economy, to promote an imaginary that goes beyond the framework of the company by addressing the issues of contribution, sharing, communalization, horizontal management, collective intelligence, etc. This paradigm offers a basis for bringing together a host of practices to make the world more beautiful, viable, democratic and ecological.
In any case, a broad societal debate must take place to think about the foundations of a “new Quebec model”, going beyond “everything in the State” or “everything in the market”.