kosmos

The Limits to Private and PublicGoodse opening decades of this century area pivotal time in which many of ourcurrent beliefs and practices will be re-examined. During the last century, theeconomic and political catastrophesthat befell the world inspired an earliergeneration to create a multilateral sys-tem defined by an unprecedented vi-sion of cooperation and security for theinternational community. It promisedthat global private goods (financial in-vestment, private credit and trade) andglobal public goods (aid, loans throughthe International Monetary Fund andWorld Bank and other assistance from

international development programs) would resolve the world’smajor domestic and transborder economic problems. But thisgrand experiment in international cooperation has failedmiserably.

For generations our resources have been under assault from globalmarket forces, regional and national policy development, and in-adequate legal recognition of common property rights. State cap-italism, powered by cheap labor, fossil fuels, low commodity pricesand unrealistic interest rates, has generated a planet wide ‘fire sale,’liquidating Earth’s resources at an increasingly rapid pace. Nowthis centuries-long credit boom of natural and material resourcesis ending as we stare, incredulously, into a gigantic void of ourown making. We have begun to see that the benefits of perpetualeconomic growth are not compensating for the vast damages andrisks they create—from energy insecurity, global warming, eco-logical degradation and species loss to hunger, poverty, debt andfinancial meltdown. We’re also realizing that neither the privatesphere of property and trade nor the public sphere of governmentprovision and distribution—which created these problems to beginwith—are capable of solving them. On one hand, internationalcommerce cannot address the harmful externalities that transcendborders because global ‘private’ goods are profit-driven for thebenefit of consumers and shareholders, not equity-driven for themasses. On the other hand, sovereign governments are notequipped to manage global problems either by themselves orthrough a global institutional framework, since there is no actual‘public’ governance at the international level to effectivelymanage and protect these resources for the world’s peopleas a whole.

Tragedy of EnclosuresBeginning with Garrett Hardin’s classic example of shepherds whoshare a field to graze their flocks—but unwittingly cause the landto be overused and degraded—the idea of scarcity through over-consumption has been called a tragedy of the commons. ere arecountless instances of openly-accessed resources becoming vul-nerable to encroachment and misuse, leading to acute social orecological problems. Yet Elinor Ostrom and others have shownthat failed commons are not inevitable. When local users com-municate, build trust, and organize to create rules to govern howtheir resources should be used, they can protect their commonsfrom overuse in the interest of the common good.

So the primary challenge facing the world is not one of failed com-mons. Rather, it’s a tragedy of enclosures—the legalization of pri-vate property and commodity exchange by the state, and thetransference and overuse of commonly managed resources by themarketplace. e history of the privatization of capital and natu-ral resources is well known. Beginning in the 12th century innorthern Europe, and intensifying during the 16th century, theemerging free market laid claim to what seemed to be an endlesssupply of natural resources existing in empty and limitless space.Enterprising merchants, bankers and politicians enclosed these‘vacant’ areas and turned them into legally titled property. Overthe past several centuries, similar enclosure movements havespread across the world, subjugating and extracting resourceswhich were previously unownable, fully accessible and oen gov-erned by local custom. Under the system of property rights andsovereign boundaries that has evolved, resource managers (pub-lic sector) and producers and providers (private sector) are keptdistinctly separate from resource users (commoners). ese so-cial divisions produce and reproduce the modern institutionalnorms of economic management and the creation of market valuethrough profit and interest, which are said to be the basis of dy-namic social progress and economic growth. But through thisprocess of wealth creation, poor and native peoples have beenevicted from their villages and lands and displaced from theirmeans of subsistence, while customary rights and traditions overresources are criminalized. e history of enclosures is a legacyof struggle and violence over rightful claims to property, whichcontinues today.

Global Common GoodsPerhaps what we are anticipating, but have been unable to definebecause of society’s pervasive commitment to free markets in driv-ing global economic integration and to sovereign reciprocity inmaking global decisions, is the idea of global common goods —the shared resources that fall outside the domains of both privateand public goods. e commons exist at the intersection of society

feature | global commons

People Sharing ResourcesToward a New Multilateralism of the Global CommonsJames Bernard Quilligan

James Bernard Quilligan

Published in Kosmos Journal, Fall | Winter 2009, www.kosmosjournal.org

and nature and are expressed in many contexts of life. ey in-clude a wide diversity of collectively inherited or produced re-sources belonging to all human beings equally. ese commons—whether local, state, interstate, regional or global in scope—connectus to the things we share and need to survive on all levels of humanactivity. Yet, because ‘the commons’ are not part of our everydayvocabulary or worldview, they are oen unrecognized. We have torefocus our conditioned mental categories to recognize the broadrange of commons that exist all around and within us (Figure 1).

Some of these resources—cultural, social and intellectual—are re-newable. Many others—natural, genetic and material resources —are not (or may be replenishable at very slow rates). At first glance,such differences may seem trivial. Yet the modern economic in-terpretation of these differences—that various commons are moreor less replenishable—has led to our civilization-wide crisis. eprevailing assumption by state capitalism that the natural, geneticand material world is infinitely replenishable, and that any scarci-ties of non-renewable resources can be managed through the pricesystem, has led to the market imperative of unlimited economicgrowth. It’s provided the ‘empirical’ and ideological justificationsfor the profit motive, speculation, capital accumulation, unrealis-tic levels of production and consumption, misallocated resources,debt, unemployment, inequality, boom-bust cycles, global com-petition for resources and exploitation of the world’s poor.

at doctrine is now being challenged by people outside of theprivate and public sectors through their reintegration of the var-ious types of commons. In transcending the polarized relation-ship between business and government, this commons movementis emerging as a potent counterforce to state capitalism. It repre-sents a consciously organized third sector, including citizens asco-managers and co-producers in the shared management andpreservation of their own resources.

e commons are not just resources but the sets of relationshipsthey create, including the communities that use them, and thecultural and social practices and property regimes that manage

them. ey represent the common responsibility of people to pro-tect and sustain their valuable common goods. But unlike localcommon goods, which have a familiar legacy of ownership, globalcommon goods have yet to be defined clearly in terms of their in-terconnectedness, common history and planetary rights. Partici-patory rules and institutions have not been fully developed forcross-border commons—including outer space and the atmos-phere, the oceans and sea-beds, world food supplies and watersources, population growth and migration, technology and media,and trade and finance. It’s clear that human society needs to builda much deeper awareness and stronger identity between its localand global commons. e decision-making, social cohesion andcollective wealth implicit in common goods must be able to scaleup and down. Local commons groups need the technical supportand knowledge of a commons-based multilateralism; yetmultilateral rules and institutions must also embody the expertiseand skills of community groups based on decisions made at thegrassroots.

Ultimately, the governance and production of common goods,both locally and transnationally, will shi the emphasis of gov-ernment away from the sanctioning of private industry. It willredirect this power and authority in two directions—upward to-ward the sanctioning of the international commons under a re-structured multilateralism, and downward toward the sanctioningof local commons by the world’s citizens under widespread com-mons agreements. To create scale-free commons, local and globalcommons groups must share a commitment not to exploit thescarcity-value of depletable resources. As a result, the focus of theprivate sector will also move away from devaluing commons re-sources as unaccountable external costs, and businesses will adopta framework of property management and value that reflects amore accurate measure of the actual costs of resource production.

Co-GovernanceUntil the modern era of enclosure and commodification, com-munities had always made up their own rules for creating andmaintaining local resources. Unlike the world’s public and privatesectors, commoners have broad experience in the supervision andsustenance of living systems to ensure equitable ways of sharingtheir uses and benefits. is knowledge—which is still held andpracticed by many indigenous peoples and community groups—is now being rediscovered. People across the world are returningto the transparent stewardship of their local commons and be-coming involved as providers as well as recipients of resources,goods and services. Now, however, the commons involves morethan just the stewardship of natural and material resources:modern technologies have also created a new generation ofcultural commons with unique forms of participation and socialcapital. Co-governance involves the principle of subsidiarity—tak-ing decisions at the lowest possible level of authority and creatingnew checks and balances on the overall decision-making activitiesof the state. e inclusion of people in the decisions that directlyaffect them formalizes the process of just governance anddemocratic oversight by closing the gap between resource users

kosmos | fall.winter 2009 37

Figure 1Types of Global Commons

Noosphere - indigenous culture and traditions, communitysupport systems, social connectedness, voluntary associa-tions, labor relations, women and children's rights, familylife, health, education, sacredness, religions and ethnicity,racial values, silence, creative works, languages, stores ofhuman knowledge and wisdom, scientific knowledge, eth-nobotanical knowledge, ideas, intellectual property, infor-mation, communication flows, airwaves, internet, freeculture, cultural treasures, music, arts, purchasing power,the social right to issue money, security, risk management

Biosphere - fisheries, agriculture, forests, land, pastures,ecosystems, parks, gardens, seeds, food crops, genetic lifeforms and species, living creatures

Physiosphere - the elements, minerals, inorganic energy,water, climate, atmosphere, stratosphere

and resource managers, producers and providers. Co-governancethus entails the development of non-centralized rules andinstitutions pertaining to the major questions of access, control,use and distribution of the wealth generated on a commons. eseactivities evolve out of the shared meaning and values of the stake-holders who depend upon a resource for their survival and well-being. e sharing of duties and decision-making over the use,protection and replenishment of a particular resource thereforerequires personal and group qualities such as moral responsibil-ity, reciprocity, trust, mutual aid, fellowship and cooperation.

e kinds of expertise and understanding that people have devel-oped through the local management of resources must be scaledup to the global level. Incentives for sharing the global commonsneed to be built into multilateral rules and institutions. By thesame token, local development needs an international supportsystem that is generative in purpose—not technocratic, national-istic or commercial. It’s really not global governance that is re-quired, but global co-governance. is mutual governance wouldinvolve independent states giving regulatory legitimacy and au-thority to global institutions through international standards forthe management and protection of global common goods. Ini-tially, these common goods could be created through a coopera-tive system for managing long-term risks, such as degradation ofEarth’s living systems, global climate change, nuclear prolifera-tion, terrorism, trade protectionism, security of global supplies,threats of fragile and failed states, and unequal representation ofdeveloping nations in global decision-making.

Co-ProductionWhile co-governance brings together resource users and man-agers, co-production involves the collaboration of resource usersand resource producers and providers through open social net-works. Increasingly, traditional social divisions between produc-tion and reproduction of commons resources are disappearingand unique forms of social and cultural meaning are emerging.Many people are finding new identity and significance throughsharing information, seeking consensus-based solutions, keepingvalue in their communities, and distributing the benefits that arisefrom the use of commons resources. Countless hub-culture com-munities are forming, not only on the internet, but also throughlocal, regional and global organizations (Figure 2).

A notable development in many of these networked relationshipsis the free labor and creativity that are generated without financialincentives or rewards. When users are directly involved in theproduction and delivery of goods and services, they developcooperative skills, knowledge and wealth beyond the constraintsof extractive profits, patents, trademarks, copyrights, traditionalownership, paid work, commodity values and other value-addedmeasures. Social production thus entails not only new forms ofproperty management, but also a different measure of value. isnew capital—based on communication, care, respect, validation,cooperation, common welfare and transparent decision-making—is reframing the political debate on commons resource

management and the direct production of social and culturalwealth.

As mentioned, the idea of ‘global public goods’ created by sover-eign nations is really a non-sequitur since there is no internationalframework corresponding to domestic public government whichis designed to manage resources for the people of the world as awhole. But we are recognizing that another form of global goods—social innovation, networked collaboration, collective action,voluntary associations, peer support networks and multi-stake-holder participation—is being created at the international level.It’s possible that the co-production of global common goods cannow be facilitated through direct collaboration between local re-source users and multilateral institutions, where service users be-come involved in the mutual support and delivery of goods andservices. e creation of a global resource pool entails an entirelynew phase of multilateralism, in which nations collectively agreeto preserve and protect the various commons of Earth and main-tain a pool of shared production and goods large enough to pro-vide for everyone’s needs. In giving up a portion of theirsovereignty, rich nations would recycle their excess resourcesthrough this global clearinghouse, which would then be redis-tributed to poor nations needing assistance. e resources re-quired for production and the goods that are produced would gointo this common pool, and the goods which people consume oruse would come from it.

Social Charterse Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees to everyperson the freedom from want and fear. is is a good beginning.Yet because human rights are dependent on government to legit-imate them, the UN Declaration does not redirect the source ofthese rights away from sovereign governments to the sovereignpeople of a particular commons. As global citizens, regardless ofnational obligations, we have a responsibility to engage in areasof community and transborder action where the state and privatesectors have little jurisdiction, authority or experience. Commonsrights differ from human rights and civil rights because they arise,not through the legislation of a state, but through a customary oremerging identification with an ecology, a cultural resource area,a social need, or a form of collective labor. Commons rights affirmthe sovereignty of human beings over their means of sustenanceand well-being. ey vest us with a moral authority and social

Figure 2

Emerging Forms of Co-Production

resource-based economies, bartering, gi economies,complementary currencies, community reciprocity sys-tems, free shops, fair trade markets, producer cooperatives,trade unions, entrepreneurial networks, scientific and ac-ademic commons; and internet modalities such as opensource soware, open electronic media, shared licensing,collaborative knowledge and design, social networks, at-tention economies, creative commons copyrights,wikipedia, websites, file sharing, email and chat rooms

38 kosmos | fall.winter 2009

legitimacy to make decisions and create agreements on the sharingof resources that ensure our rights to survival and security.

This creates an entirely new context for collective action. Insteadof seeking individual and human rights from the state, people maybegin to claim long-term authority over resources, governance andsocial value as their planetary birthrights—both at a communityand global level. Commons rights provide an important basis forcreating covenants and institutions that are not state-managed tonegotiate the protection and sustenance of resources and ensurethat the mutual interests of all stakeholders are directly repre-sented. rough the assertion of people’s inherent rights to a com-mons, the role of the state would become much more balancedbetween enabling the corporate sector and enabling citizens. In-stead of regulating commerce and finance in the public interest(while also regulating the commons for the benefit of commerceand finance), the new duty of the state would be to confirm thedeclarations of the rights of people to their commons, allowingthem to manage their own resources by recognizing and uphold-ing their social charters and commons trusts.

A social charter is a social and institutional framework providingincentives for the management and protection of commons re-sources. Creating a social charter requires the support and in-volvement of people across a region or community of interest whodepend on specific common goods for their livelihood and wel-fare. A social charter can be developed for a single commons or foroverlapping commons (Figure 1).

Given the uniqueness of every commons, there is no universaltemplate for social charters—but a baseline is emerging. A socialcharter for a commons should include, at minimum, a summaryof traditional or emerging claims to legitimacy; a declaration ofthe rights and entitlements of users and producers; a code ofethics; elaboration of common values and standards; a statementof benefits; a notice of claims to reparations or re-territorializa-tion of boundaries; and a practical framework for cooperation.Democratic and transparent decision-making for the mainte-nance and preservation of a particular commons would be devel-oped through the collective action of citizens, customaryrepresentatives, social networks, academics, scientists, bilateraldonors, development partners, regional organizers, intergovern-mental organizations, media and other stakeholders—with limitedinput from national governments and the private sector. Citizenswho create a social charter thus ensure that administrative poweris decentralized in order to maintain community access to—andsovereignty over—their own commons.

Commons TrustsWhile social charters ensure a broad political foundation for theco-governance and co-production of common property regimes,they do not make them operational. at requires the developmentof commons trusts, which establish the specific legal conditionsfor people to help each other manage and produce what each ofthem needs. Land and forest trusts are familiar examples. Commons

trusts are institutions, usually involving both physical and finan-cial assets, which preserve and manage resources inherited frompast generations on behalf of present and future generations. Bydefinition, commons trusts are the only fiduciary institutions ac-countable for the long-term preservation and sustenance of a re-source. at’s because neither of our existing property regimes—private nor public—have a mandate to provide fair access andlong-term protection for critical resources. Under its current op-erational rules and institutions, state capitalism has forsaken suchlong-term fiscal responsibility by neglecting to keep the actualvalue of the commons separate from the mainstream economy.is 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 volatilityand boom-bust cycles, and contributing enormously to theplanet’s ecological, energy and political instability.

e creation of commons trusts allows the private and public sec-tors to continue to focus on profit, investment and budgetary ap-propriations, while the commons becomes a primary means ofstabilizing the principal of commons reserves to maintain the di-versity and sustainability of the overall economy. Commonstrustees have two functions. First, they have a responsibility to de-cide what proportion of their commons resources should be mon-etized by renting them to the private sector for extraction andproduction. A percentage of this resource rent would then be dis-tributed to citizens by the state as dividends (or used for otherpurposes such as maintenance of the commons goods which arebeing rented, or mitigation of the negative effects of renting thesegoods). Commons trusts thus guarantee that those who are un-protected have rights to basic sustenance from their own re-sources. Yet the needs of present beneficiaries are a secondaryresponsibility. e primary obligation of trust managers is to keepthe value created through the commons within the commons tothe extent possible, so that the community can hold in reserve thelarger portion of its natural, genetic, and material stock for thebenefit of people and species yet unborn, while generating cul-tural, social and intellectual capital for current generations. In thisway, the harmful effects of state capitalism are rebalanced: privateindustry flourishes from the surplus resources which are rentedfrom commons trusts, the socially marginalized and vulnerablereceive a subsistence income from the state, and the primary assetsof the commons are preserved and regenerated. is dynamicequilibrium is achieved through new temporal modalities in thesystem of multilateral co-governance and co-productionintroduced through the creation of commons trusts across the world(Figure 3).

In this emerging multilateral system, the financial incentives ofbusinesses and government continue to operate as before. But thedifference now is that the long-term wealth guaranteed by com-mons trusts is not generated through the potential financial rev-enue of the commons assets they are managing. Instead ofregarding these commons as a source of profit, commons trustsdetermine their intrinsic worth (the actual value of passing on

kosmos | fall.winter 2009 39

what we have inherited to future generations and allowing thisstock to be replenished and restored) through the full participa-tory choice of citizens on whether or not to spend this commonscapital. Commons trusts thus create a new time signature basedon the preservation of commons resources and the resilience ofthe system that manages and produces them—not on the assets ofthe 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 ofthe carrying capacity of the global commons to support life andlife systems, expressed through sustainable choice.

Broadly speaking, the creation of local commons trusts worldwideentails three significant changes:

• government shis its primary emphasis from issuing corporatecharters and licensing the private sector to approving social char-ters and open licenses for resource preservation and cultural andsocial production through commons trusts

• commons trusts exercise a fiduciary duty to preserve natural, ge-netic and material commons but can decide to rent a proportionof these resource rights to businesses

• businesses may rent the rights to extract and produce a resourcefrom a commons trust, creating profits and positive externalitiesthrough innovation, competitive products and services, and ad-justment of the market to the actual costs of resources

Commons Reserve CurrencyUnder the present economic system, money is created by nationalgovernments and private banks through loans. To maintain thesupply of money needed to repay both the interest and principalon these loans, banks must continually find new credit applicantsto create sufficient demand for more loans. Hence, banks arecontinually pushing credit, driving corporations to borrow moreto produce, and citizens to borrow more to consume. is is ourglobal dilemma. On one hand, no amount of corporate produc-tion and consumer spending can satisfy the banks’ continual de-mands for repayment of these loans; on the other, the algorithm

of perpetual economic growthadopted by banks, corporationsand consumers has no offsettingformula for repaying the accumu-lating debt and redeeming thedamage that this compulsivegrowth is wreaking on the com-mons. In terms of non-renewableresources such as oil—as well asmany other renewable resources—human society has been spend-ing not only the interest but sig-nificant portions of the principal.If we do not reverse this situa-tion—if bank-driven overproduc-

tion and overconsumption continue to generate speculation andhoarding of physical and financial assets, loan defaults and joblosses, hunger and poverty, and carbon emissions and climatechange—soon the planet will not only have diminishing returnsfrom the interest on its commons resources, but the principal it-self will be gone.

Since the money system and individual purchasing power are so-cial commons, perhaps there is a way to both stabilize and de-mocratize money. e world community could create a form ofmonetary reference—belonging and accountable to everyone —that is not dependent on the economic or political decisions of asingle state or the monetary nationalism of currency-issuingstates. Global commons representatives could collaborate to pro-duce an international currency, backed by a new kind of reserveasset, to provide a stable and usable exchange credit for business,trade and other social transactions. is new system would gen-erate a broad measure of common wealth and well-being that isnot based on productivity, profit or interest, but on the perpetualvitality and continuous adaptation of local resources to support agood quality of life for all human beings. It would mean turningthe present system of private credit—including banking and fi-nance—into a commons utility through the conversion of debt toequity across all sectors of society. It would mean using our com-mons-based capital—cultural, social, intellectual, natural, genetic,and material—as collateral for an equity-based global reserve sys-tem that issues credit underpinned by these resources.

Under this new reserve system, commons assets would form thebasis of a composite standard of value. For example, a ReserveBasket of Global Common Goods could include indicators forcultural resources such as indigenous wisdom, household workand the arts; social resources such as health, literacy, economicoutput and income distribution; intellectual resources such as sci-entific knowledge, intellectual property and information flows; natu-ral resources such as air and water quality, ecosystem health andbiological diversity; genetic resources such as living creatures, or-gans and seeds; and material resources such as gold, oil, waterand the atmosphere. Rather than convert commons assets into amarket value, these indicators would generate a unique index based

40 kosmos | fall.winter 2009

Figure 3Temporal Modalities Generated by Commons Trusts

... lease resources to the private sector for theshort-term, from which credit finance andrevenues are generated to fund entrepreneur-ship and for-profit development and to re-plenish and protect specific commons

... decide on resource user fees for the mid-term,in conjunction with the state, from which divi-dends and other pubic goods are distributeddirectly to the poor and those who are displacedor suffer the effects of resource extraction

... express human potential in real time bygenerating economic rent and exchange creditfrom the enclosure, extraction and use ofcommons assets, driving consumption andinvestment in private goods to meet the basicneeds of current generations

... preserve and manage long-term commonsassets for future generations by holding themin trust and establishing a commons reservebase with a new metric of sustainability

on the sustainability of the global commons and the value thatthese common goods have for our natural and social quality oflife and that of future generations. Resource units in this reserveindex would include historically important depletable resources,and also resources that are currently depletable and are likely to bedepletable in the future. But it would also include resources thatare replenishable and reflect social productivity, human securityand well-being. By continually measuring and averaging the in-dices of each resource in this basket, trustees of the commons re-serve system could decide the proportion of those commonsresources that should remain untapped as principal. At the sametime, the commons reserve system would replace the present in-terest rate mechanism with a sustainability rate (Figure 4).

is commons reserve currency would function through thecreation of co-credit—a participatory unit of value used in trading,investment and decision-making. As co-credits are lost or gainedin each transaction, the deficit or surplus would be accounted withreference to the sustainability rate—a real-time measure reflectingthe capacity of the global commons to provide and sustain thewell-being of present and future generations. At any givenmoment, if the sustainability rate is low, the co-credit is worth lessrelative to its value in an exchange, which may cause a buyer tospend less, or perhaps not spend or to postpone spending; and ifthe sustainability rate is higher, the co-credit will be worth morein the exchange, which may convince the buyer to spend more.So, through co-credit exchange among buyers and sellers, communitymembers would determine the value of their own productionbased on the capacity of the global commons to support the nat-ural and social quality of life. Each use of a co-credit (whether thesustainability rate is low or high) is literally a vote for the longevity,regeneration and diversity of the planet’s common goods, enablinghuman civilization to protect its principal and withdraw from thecommons a smaller portion of its resources. Since the commonsreserve system guarantees a stable and lasting source of global cap-ital, the development of co-credit exchange would eliminate theneed for banks, financial institutions, government-issued cur-rency, and a debt-based money system in which the continual pay-ment of interest on loans requires unsustainable levels ofproduction and consumption to monetize the existing debt.

Global Common WealthEndless economic growth is crashing against the limits of Earth’svital systems. In coming years, the recovery of our suppressedcommons as a source of participative governance and non-mon-etized value will become critical as the private and public sectorssearch for a way out of the current global economic, energy andecological crises. It’s a challenging puzzle:

A New Story of Global Common Wealth is emerging. Imagine aworld ... where businesses thrive. Governments evolve power up-ward to an international trusteeship for the commons, giving upa portion of their sovereignty through new global standards of co-operation, trust and shared values. Government authority alsoshis downward to citizens and their commons organizationsthrough social charters. Local commons trusts organize and affil-iate with each other across the world, providing independentchecks and balances on the power of global corporations, sover-eign governments and multilateral institutions. Global co-gover-nance creates the means for a systematic redistribution of globalcommon goods. Cultural and social production preserves re-sources and generates new wealth, alongside—but independentof—the private production of wealth. A commons reserve cur-rency available through co-credits enables humanity to base itseconomic transactions directly on the sustainability and resilienceof the global commons. And world society creates a dynamic equi-librium between (private) property rights, (public) sovereignrights, and (commons) sustainability rights through a new multi-lateral system of co-governance and co-production, transcendingthe dichotomies of state capitalism and transforming life acrossthe planet.

James Bernard Quilligan has been an analyst and administrator in thefield of international development since 1975. He has served as a pol-icy advisor and writer for many politicians and leaders, including PierreTrudeau, Francois Mitterand, Julius Nyerere, Olof Palme, Willy Brandt,Jimmy Carter and HRH Prince El Hassan.

The chart on the next page shows the global context of common truststhrough an example—a Sky Trust for clean air, climate wealth andsecurity.

Figure 4Basket of Global Common Goods as Resource Reserves

(including quantifiable indicators for cultural, social, intellectual, natural,genetic and material commons)

- averaged into a composite standard of value -

maintaining principal creating a sustainability rate

- expressed through -

Commons Reserve CurrencyCo-Credit Exchange

kosmos | fall.winter 2009 41

we cannot end the financial crisis without a new monetarysystem

we cannot create a new monetary system without creatinglong-termincentives forsolvingtheecologicalandenergycrises

we cannot create long-term incentives to solve the ecologicaland energy crises without a low-carbon system of productionand trade

wecannotcreatea low-carbonsystemofproductionandtradewithout a new multilateral system of governance

we cannot create a new multilateralism without a totalredefinition of wealth

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42 kosmos | fall.winter 2009 chart by Mary Beth Steisslinger | design by Kimberly Werner

kosmos | fall.winter 2009 43