Sustaining the commons: between care and institution

A commons is less a resource than something people continually do together — so what allows that doing to last? Massimo De Angelis, founding editor of The Commoner and a longtime theorist of commoning as a social process rather than a shared object, closes the Governance theme by turning it into a question of political economy: not how power is distributed within a structure, but how a community sustains the value, care, and reproduction practices that let it govern itself at all. Drawing together the two threads that have run through the afternoon — the intimate labour of care and reproduction, and the weight and reach of established institutions — his vision asks under what conditions commons can hold their ground between market and state, and whether even large institutions might be remade as places where that reproduction becomes possible.