Collaborative Commons: The 4th Social Sector
Society has come to rely on the government, corporate, and NGO sectors to solve societal problems and guide us into the future.
Unfortunately, our problems became to complex for those sectors to solve them individually, or even collectively. Socially complex wicked problems have emerged in the last few decades have proven to be unsolvable by the sectors.
Time Between Worlds
We are in a time between worlds, meaning society is in a transition where it has not figured out how to solve its new problems, yet. We have transitioned from predominantly solvable technical, scientific, and political tame problems to predominantly socially complex wicked problems.
The Sectors Are Trying
There are serious efforts underway from the government, corporate, and NGOs sectors yet we continue to slide backwards by almost every measure. The reason is that government, corporate, and NGO sectors emerged centuries apart, centuries ago to solve the tame problems of their day, and hence, cannot now or ever resolve today’s wicked problems.
The Purpose of the Social Sectors
These sectors emerged as new social problems emerged. First, government (early civilizations), then corporate (~16th century), and then NGOs (~19th century) sectors, each with a purpose.
The role of the government sector was law and order. The role of the corporate sector was innovation and profit. The role of the non-government sector was coordination and compromise. Each solved emerging issues of their time, but none of them can solve each other’s issues, nor today’s issues of socio-economic problems, with a sufficient degree of efficiency.
The existing three sectors have tried to mitigate the economic externalities that are causing many of today’s issues, but that is an impossible and futile task — to mitigate for externalities that occur in nearly every transaction. Failure by each sector to address wicked issues in the last two decades is prompting a new sector.
Society is due for another sector to emerge to resolve the next set of complex, wicked problems. We are in a time between worlds, again.
The Weak and Not-So Weak Signals of the Emerging Sector
The emergence of a new sector to resolve society’s new wicked problems is underway. There are many weak and not-so weak signals from “small islands of coherence”; those thousands of entities on their sustainability paths that will eventually coalesce into the new Collaborative Commons sector.
What these “islands of coherency” need is the vision and leadership or a catalyst to create a “continent of coherence”, the space for this fourth social sector to carry us beyond the time between worlds to the time of the new world.
Humans are Problem Solvers
In brief, humans are problem solvers and use three modes of social interaction to solve problems (hierarchism, individualism, and egalitarianism). As people congregated to solve issues, the modes of social interaction manifested themselves into governance styles (hierarchy, market, and network, respectively). As like-minded people organized, the three governance styles manifested into the three sectors (government, corporate, and NGOs).
The three sectors are structural representations of human nature and how we solve problems. Perhaps more bazaar, is that sector organizations did not/do not choose their governance styles, the governance styles chose them. The sectors become the vehicle to carry the problem-solving governance.
Collaborative Commons as the Fourth Sector
The fourth sector is emerging under the same forces that the previous sectors emerged from (mode of interaction-to-governance style-to-sector).
In the latter half of the 20th century, a new mode of cross-sectoral social interaction emerged via the internet. This mode of interaction manifested into a new governance style (shared, or meta-governance) which in turn is manifesting itself into a Collaborative Commons sector. This, like the previous sectors, is an unstoppable force, yet one that is not automatically headed for a “continent of coherency”. The task at hand is to transition to this sector as elegantly and peacefully as possible.
Technological Tectonic Shifts to create a Collaborative Commons Continent
This continent is coming together as a result of the convergence of the emerging technologies of our time.
The Collaborative Commons will be supported by the emerging technologies of the last half century relative to ICT, Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, GIS, blockchain, cryptography, and the myriad of supporting technologies. These technologies are needed to manage the complexity of planetary issues.
The Purpose of the Collaborative Commons
The purpose of the Collaborative Commons is not just to mitigate social and environmental externalities, but to internalize these economic externalities.
Internalized externalities is a function of currencies and their associated economic systems. Such a solution was unfathomable at the turn of the century, but now there are 10,000+ currency experiments occurring.
The Four Domains of the Collaborative Commons
Internalizing social and environmental externalities requires governance that is more complex than what is currently available, and hence, technologies to support collaborative governance.
The four domains include Capital, Metric (Outputs), Cryptocurrency, and a Governance domains that is supported by a canonical unit that ties the domains together.
Four Domains of a Collaborative Commons and a Canonical or Base Unit
This generic four-domain template was used to create EcoCommerce, a NCU-based (natural capital unit) socio-economic model to internalize ecological benefits and costs.
As the canonical unit, the NCU supports natural capital accounting, currency source, calculating and accounting for ecosystem services, and influences how a variety of governance issues are resolved.
And so the trick of the Collaborative Commons, that is to internalize social and ecological externalities, is to identify a canonical unit to support a “mini” economic system that recognizes values the larger economic system cannot.
Collaborative Governance Literacy
The gateway to a Collaborative Commons sector is collaborative governance literacy. Much like the shift from fiefdoms to democracies required a governance literacy, so to does this shift.
The Collaborative Commons requires meta-governance or shared-governance that transcend the three governance styles and their three structural representative sectors.
Governance actors and styles of three organizations and how they plot out relative to each other. Meta-governance or shared governance strategies require literacy in how actors and styles interact.
A governance preference survey provides insights on where inherent conflicts and compatibilities may lie relative to intra- and inter-organizational issues and across a multi-stakeholder collaboration that includes practitioners and policymakers.
The most overlooked governance actors are private practitioners, as they, themselves may not consider themselves as governance actors.
Organizing for the Collaborative Commons
Further details of the Collaborative Commons sector, the template to account for the socio-economic values, how specific governance styles are better suited to resolve technical, scientific, political, and wicked problems, and how EcoCommerce aligns these forces to address the wicked problem of landscape sustainability are written about extensively.
Please make a connection if you can support or it you could benefit from the Collaborative Commons.
Author
Tim Gieseke has managed parallel careers in landscape management, policy, science, economics, and governance since the turn of the century. In the early 2000s, he had a solid understanding of the inherent limitations of emerging ecosystem service markets. In response he took a path that made sense to him as a practitioner while meeting the needs of the government, NGO, and private sectors.
In addition to the dozens of local, state, regional, and natural efforts he was involved in, he explained his findings in three books that addressed the environmental, socio-economic, and governance aspects of this emergent economy he named EcoCommerce®.
He explains how to address this wicked problem in detail in his three books:
EcoCommerce 101: Adding an ecological dimension to the economy (2011) This book covers the conservation movement history in USA and assesses the emerging and immature eco-markets. Written before knowledge of crypto, Gieseke prophetically stated that a “new coin” will be needed to address the complexity of eco-markets. The book concludes by describing the micro-ecocommerce and macro-ecocommerce parameters of this natural capital-based economic system and the ways it could emerge.
Shared Governance for Sustainable Working Landscapes (2016)
This book introduced the NCU (natural capital unit) as the catalyst for shared governance and natural capital accounting. Using a dozen case studies, the book examines how governance actors and governance styles influence the design and delivery of programs and markets. As an accounting unit, the NCU creates an interoperable platform for the suite of ecosystem services.
Collaborative Environmental Governance Frameworks: A practical guide (2019)
This book demystifies collaborative governance by using an assessment model based on four governance actors and three governance styles. The model uniquely describes the nearly infinite variations of governance frameworks. With this model, a meta-governor can foresee governance conflicts as well as apply the right mix of governance to specific types of problems, whether they are technical, scientific, political, or social (wicked) problems.
