The Commons in Practice: Case Studies From Around the World
Part 4 of our Sunday launch series introducing the Commons.
Tl;dr: From alpine pastures and salmon fisheries to offshore wind farms and online encyclopedias, commons take many forms. This article explores a wide range of real-world commons that span geographies, culture, and domains.
This is Part 4 of our five-part series exploring the Commons as a practical, community-led alternative for meeting shared needs. If you’re new to the series, start with Part 1 (why traditional institutions struggle to respond to today’s overlapping crises), Part 2 (on what the Commons is and what makes it different), and Part 3 (about the tools that help commons flourish).
Introduction
I hope that by now, this series has shown you that the Commons is not an abstract utopia nor a relic of the past.
In this article, I’d like to give you a taste of where it’s happening today—in rural fields, urban neighbourhoods, and even the code running our digital infrastructure. We’ll move from the oldest subsistence commons to the newest digital ones, from housing, food, and energy to money and finance, and finally to the networks and towns that weave it all together.
Note: this is a rather long one, so grab a large cup of tea and make yourself comfortable. Or, if you’re short on time, just scroll through until something catches your eye.
Subsistence Commons: Ancient Foundations, Living Traditions
Ancient place-based commons, generally formed around vital natural resources, are the oldest-known expression of commoning, and what most people traditionally associate with the “Commons”. Referred to as subsistence commons by renowned Commons advocate David Bollier, they have sustained and nurtured indigenous populations for centuries—or even longer.
I began working on this article two months ago while vacationing in the beautiful Swiss Alps. High up in the alpine meadows, villages have collectively managed mountain pastures for more than 700 years. Each spring, neighbours gather to decide which slopes will be grazed first, how many cattle each household may bring, and when to move the herds so the land can recover. Membership rights are tied to residence, such that benefits remain within the community. Now, whenever the sound of cowbells drifts across the valley, I’m reminded of a commons that once escaped my tourist’s eyes.
In Northern Africa, across the Sahel, pastoralists and farming communities have long relied on similar rotational grazing calendars, together with rules for accessing wells and migrational corridors, to manage vast lands under customary law. Mediated by councils of elders, these systems have ensured that fragile semi-arid ecosystems remain capable of supporting both herds and crops for many centuries—often across ethnic, religious, and tribal boundaries.
Some still-running commons even span millennia, such as the salmon fisheries in British Columbia. Along the Pacific Northwest coast of Canada, indigenous people from several nations have used practices such as a seasonal harvesting, ceremonies, and oral law to steward salmon habitats. Today, many of these nations are co-governing fisheries with state agencies, in arrangements that combine ancestral wisdom with legal recognition—ensuring both cultural continuity as well as ecological sustainability.
Dating back to Spanish colonial times, and layered onto older indigenous traditions, acequias are shared irrigation canals that supply water to small farmers. Over 600 such acequias remain active in New Mexico (USA), governed by locally elected mayordomos and community assemblies. A closely related institution in Mexico is the ejido, where communities collectively own and manage farmlands and forests. Though weakened by agrarian reforms in the 1990s, ejidos still cover a significant share of Mexico’s territory. Both examples illustrate how people in arid landscapes have long relied on commons-based institutions for managing scarce resources—and how they show resilience under pressure: drought and legal threats in New Mexico; neoliberal land reforms in Mexico.
Niger’s Majia Valley is a successful case study of farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) projects. Faced with severe desertification in the 1980s, farmers revived traditional practices of protecting and pruning the shoots of trees and shrubs that naturally sprout from old root systems. Over time, millions of trees were regenerated across more than 5 million hectares. This farmer-led commons has restored soil fertility, improved crop yields, and replenished groundwater. Now recognised as one of the world’s largest grassroots-led environmental restorations, FMNR has also strengthened community solidarity and cooperation across ethnic and religious lines.
These are just a few examples of subsistence commons. They can be found on all continents, across all territories, deeply embedded in local tradition and customary law. Tied to seasonal rhythms, they carefully balance community needs with regeneration. And this is why they have endured over many generations, powerful reminders that local communities can be trusted stewards of our precious natural ecosystems.
Digital Commons: Knowledge, Software, and Design
In Part 2, I hinted at a practical resurgence of the Commons alongside the intellectual revival spearheaded by Professor Elinor Ostrom. That resurgence unfolded, rather spectacularly, in the digital realm—and was largely enabled by the rise of the Internet.
If subsistence commons are deeply rooted in place, digital commons seem to float above it: borderless, yet globally accessible. They show that it’s possible to create, maintain, and scale global commons on a planetary level without centralised ownership or government control.
Knowledge Commons
Knowledge commons are collectively created repositories of information, learning, and culture that are open for anyone to use and share.
Starting in 2001, Wikipedia has grown into the world’s largest encyclopedia, with over 7 million articles in English alone (for a total of 63 million across all languages). It now has millions of registered users and ranks among the most visited websites in the world. Crucially, it is also a commons: entirely built by volunteer contributions, with tens of thousands of active editors who collectively write, review, and fact-check content under a framework of community-created policies. Its tools include Creative Commons licensing, transparent version histories for every page, and an open arbitration process for disputes.
Despite challenges around editor diversity and governance centralisation, it remains the flagship example of a knowledge commons at planetary scale.
Wikipedia is based on the wiki model, a powerful hypertext template for collaborative editing on the Internet. Wikis are the foundation of many digital knowledge commons, and serve as the basis for projects like Wikibooks (open textbooks), Wiktionary (collaborative dictionaries), and Wikisource (a library of public-domain and freely licensed texts). They all operate on the same principles: openly licensed content, community authorship, transparent version histories, and collective governance.
Open Educational Resources (OER) extend this logic to science and education. Initiatives such as MIT OpenCourseWare publish entire university courses online for free, while repositories like arXiv and GenBank provide open access to scientific papers and genetic data. Though not strictly self-governed commons, they open the doors of knowledge more widely through open licensing, mixing community contributions with institutional support—university hosting and public funding—to keep resources freely available.
Software-based Commons
Free and open-source software (FOSS) underpins much of the modern Internet, and indeed the world’s digital infrastructure.
For instance, Linux, an open-source operating system kernel, powers all of the world’s top supercomputers, most smartphones (through Android), and countless other systems. Apache HTTP Server has long been the leading web server software, at its peak powering nearly two-thirds of all websites, and still serving a significant share today. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) introduced public-key cryptography to everyday users, and remains critical for securing email and verifying the authenticity of software and digital communications. WordPress powers more than 40% of all websites as a free content management system. And Mozilla Firefox has long been the flagship open-source web browser, still serving more than 200 million users worldwide.
These projects are commons both in design and governance. Their source code is openly available under licences that guarantee free use, modification, and redistribution while protecting them from enclosure. Governance is often meritocratic, in that influence is earned by the strength and consistency of one’s contributions—though many larger projects also rely on foundation-based models for coordination and long-term stability.
This combination has allowed FOSS to sustain critical digital infrastructure at global scale, even if questions remain about reliance on corporate sponsors and the concentration of authority among core maintainers.
Design Commons
Digital commons can also have a physical footprint—especially when combining open-source hardware design with local material production.
Fab Labs, maker spaces, and tool libraries provide shared community access to equipment such as 3D printers or laser cutters, enabling people to prototype and produce goods without relying proprietary designs or expensive industrial facilities. A Fab Lab in Nairobi, for instance, might build a replacement part for a water plant using open-source plans uploaded from Barcelona, tweak the design to fit local materials, and then share the modified plan back with the rest of the network.
This exemplifies the principle of cosmolocalism that we saw in Part 3: design and share globally, but produce and manufacture locally. This shared production model based on open designs offers exciting new possibilities for local innovation, circular economies, and reduced dependency on global supply chains.
Commons-based Peer Production
Digital commons are best understood through the lens of Commons-based Peer Production (CBPP). As the previous case studies show, CBPP mobilises large numbers of contributors around open platforms. But what particularly distinguishes CBBP is its ecosystem of three stakeholder “classes”:
Productive community: volunteers or professionals who co-create the resource—such as Wikipedia editors, Linux developers, or hardware designers.
Entrepreneurial coalition: companies that build value-added services or products on top of the resource—such as RedHat for Linux, Automattic for Wordpress, or commercial 3D-printing firms drawing on open hardware designs.
Enabling institutions: not-for-profits, universities, or public agencies that provide technical, legal, financial, or governance support. Examples include the Wikimedia Foundation for several wiki projects (including Wikipedia), Cornell University Library for arXiv, and municipalities that host or fund local Fab Labs.
This tripartite structure allows digital commons to flourish in partnership with both markets and governments, while ensuring that contributions remain open and communities retain a meaningful role in shaping them.
Meeting Material Needs: Housing, Food, Energy
In this section, I’d like to highlight how commoning principles can be applied to key ‘economic’ sectors that provide major essentials of daily life. Many of these models involve hybrid approaches that blend community, market, and state elements.
A. Land and Housing
Community Land Trusts
Community land trusts (CLTs) are non-profit, community-governed organisations that own and hold land in trust to ensure it remains permanently affordable and used for the benefit of the community. A key feature is the separation of land ownership from building ownership: land is taken off the market and kept in community hands, but residents can still buy and sell properties. However, resale prices are generally capped and any redevelopment must serve community needs as a whole.
In Boston’s Roxbury neighbourhood, the Dudley Street Neighbourhood Initiative created one of the first urban CLTs in the United States. Since the late 1980s, it has secured more than 30 acres of land for permanently affordable housing, gardens, parks, playgrounds, and other community facilities. Entirely grassroots-led, it became the first community in the U.S. to win eminent domain rights—a landmark shift that let residents take control of abandoned land and put it to collective use.
Today, the Champlain Housing Trust in Vermont is the largest CLT in the world, with over 3,000 housing units and a significant portfolio of commercial spaces. Studies have found that Champlain homes typically resell for about 25-30% below market rates.
There are now more than 600 CLTs globally, mainly concentrated in the United States and the United Kingdom, but spreading across Europe, Canada, and beyond. In 2012, the Community Land Trust Brussels (CLTB) became the first CLT in continental Europe. Focused on building affordable homes for low-income residents, it combines grassroots organisation with municipal partnership: the city provides subsidies and land, while CLTB enforces permanent anti-speculation covenants. On average CLTB homes cost 40% less than on the private market, and the initiative has inspired similar initiatives in Ghent (Belgium), Lille (France), and elsewhere in Europe.
In the UK, Hastings Commons has expanded the CLT model to regenerate entire neighbourhoods, focusing not only on housing but also on providing affordable work and social spaces, as well as youth support and training programmes. The organisation’s governance is distributed among an ecosystem of four interlinked non-profit organisations.
Cooperative Housing
Cooperative housing offers a different model. Unlike CLTs, housing cooperatives (coops) own both the land and the buildings on it: members don’t own their individual homes but hold shares in the cooperative, which give them long-term tenancy rights and a say in collective decision-making. To ensure long-term affordability, surpluses are re-invested in the cooperative rather than distributed.
Zurich’s Mehr als Wohnen (“More than Housing”) is one of the most ambitious cooperative housing projects in Europe, designed as a “learning and innovation platform” for non-profit housing. Built on city-leased land between 2012 and 2015, it owns 13 buildings with around 370 apartments for 1,200 residents, alongside some 150 jobs in retail, childcare, and cultural spaces. Backed by a coalition of more than 60 Zurich housing cooperatives, the project was co-designed by architects and residents, and has become a global reference point for socially and ecologically sustainable housing. Rents remain about 20% below city averages, and annual reports show high levels of neighbour support and very low reported loneliness among residents. Since 2018, it has expanded through an additional development offering homes for 400 people.
Switzerland now boasts nearly 1,300 housing cooperatives with over 174,000 units, while Germany’s Wohnungsbaugenossenschaften sector includes more than 2,000 cooperatives managing around 2.2 million homes for over 6 million residents. The largest, WG Aufbau Dresden, alone owns around 17,000 housing units.
In cities like Berlin or Hamburg, newer models such as Baugruppen (“building groups”) further enable future residents to pool resources and co-design their houses directly with architects, often gaining access to municipal land through competitive tenders or long-term leases. By bypassing developers, Baugruppen reduce costs and embed collective decision-making and sustainable design into the housing process.
B. Food
Food is one of the most tangible areas where commons approaches thrive, using a variety of creative models.
Food cooperatives
In New York City, the Brooklyn-based Park Slope Food Coop has been member-run since 1973 and now counts over 17,000 members. In addition to paying a small joining fee and making a $100 equity investment to the coop, each member contributes about 3 hours of work per month—staffing the store, stocking shelves, or doing administrative work. In exchange, they get access to high-quality food at near-wholesale prices. This “member-as-worker-as-owner-as-shopper” model not only keeps costs low, but also builds a strong culture of shared responsibility.
The model has travelled: in Paris, the Coopérative La Louve was directly inspired by Park Slope, adapting the same member-labour system to the French context and sparking a new wave of food coops across Europe.
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) schemes take a complementary approach by connecting consumers directly with farmers. Originating in Japan in the 1960s (teikei), CSAs now span the globe.
Members commit to pay upfront for a share of the seasonal harvest, giving farmers stable income and loyal customers. In return, they receive weekly or seasonal boxes of fresh local produce. By sharing production risks—members typically don’t get reimbursed if the harvest is poor—CSAs foster solidarity and community cohesion. Studies also show that participation in CSAs encourages healthier food habits, and can even improve mental health when members help with cultivation. In the U.S. alone, more than 7,000 farms now use CSA as part of direct-to-consumer sales.
De-commodifying Farmland
While food coops and CSAs organise food flows, Terre de Liens in France tackles the underlying issue of land.
With over 57,000 cooperative members, it purchases farmland collectively and leases it to organic farmers under contracts that prohibit resale or speculative development. To date, it has secured some 12,000 hectares of land, supporting more than 400 farms and 1,600 volunteers. By de-commodifying farmland, Terre de Liens ensures it remains a commons for future generations while enabling young farmers to start without crippling debt.
Urban Gardens
Commons approaches can also reshape the urban landscape itself.
Detroit has one of the longest traditions of urban agriculture in the world. As early as the 1890s, the city launched the “Pingree’s Potato Patches” programme that, with the help of unemployed workers, turned vacant lots into community gardens during economic crisis. This practice was revived in later decades through initiatives like “Farm-A-Lot”, which were replicated in cities across the country. More recently, the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative (MUFI) has converted derelict land into a community “agrihood” comprising mini-farms and community spaces in a neighbourhood marked by public neglect.
In Germany, the city of Andernach has transformed public parks and green spaces into “edible landscapes” where citizens can freely harvest vegetables, fruits, and herbs. A “traffic-light” system indicates ripeness, while unemployed residents are hired to maintain the gardens. Managed as a municipal–commons partnership, Andernach’s “Edible Town” has improved biodiversity and become a popular tourist attraction. It has also inspired the Edible City Network, an EU-funded project launched in 2018 to promote similar initiatives around the world.
By contrast, the Incredible Edible movement is entirely grassroots-led. It began in 2008 in Todmorden (UK), when residents started planting herbs and vegetables in public spaces for anyone to pick. With the motto “If you eat, you’re in,” the idea spread rapidly, and by 2012 had grown into a support network that now comprises more than 200 groups across the UK, and around 1,000 worldwide. Each local group is autonomous and adapts its processes to local contexts, participants, and resources, while the network helps connect groups to share experiences and provide mutual support.
C. Energy
On the energy side, Middelgrunden Wind Cooperative in Copenhagen is a landmark in community-owned renewable energy. When completed in 2001, it was the world’s largest offshore wind farm, with 20 turbines producing 40 MW of electricity. Around 8,500 citizens joined the cooperative to co-finance and co-own half of the project, with the municipality holding the other half—thus sharing costs, risks, benefits, and governance. Middelgrunden has become a global symbol of energy democracy, demonstrating that even large-scale infrastructure can be citizen-owned, funded, and governed.
Though the turbines are now more than two decades old and discussions about replacing them with newer, more efficient models are underway, the project continues to inspire similar initiatives across Denmark and internationally.
Belgium’s Ecopower is one of Europe’s largest renewable energy cooperatives. Founded in 1991, it has grown to more than 67,000 members and serves around 55,000 households in Flanders. Together they own a portfolio of renewable projects—wind, solar, and small hydro—with an installed capacity of around 75 MW. Members purchase electricity at cost price and actively shape decisions through democratic governance. Surpluses are re-invested into new projects and efficiency measures, with internal reports indicating that member households have reduced consumption by 30-40% over time.
Ecopower is also a founding member of REScoop.eu, the federation of 2,500 energy communities across Europe serving some 2 million citizens with clean energy.
A more experimental approach comes from Island Power, which partners with small island nations to redesign entire energy infrastructures for long-term resilience and efficiency. The dollar savings from more efficient energy use—for example, by replacing diesel-generated electricity for cooling with solar-powered or more efficient direct systems—help make services more affordable. To finance the transition, communities issue ECO vouchers, a form of use-credit obligation (UCO) that we saw in Part 3. This mechanism enables infrastructure investment without debt or equity, and further helps keep costs down over time.
In Island Power’s model, assets are generally held under a non-dominium framework (also discussed in Part 3), which prevents privatisation while aligning incentives across users, providers, and funders. This structure enables a genuine public-private-commons partnership, in which each stakeholder can contribute its strengths, without any one holding dominant power.
Monetary and Financial Commons
There’s a famous saying that money cannot feed or house us. Yet money—and finance more broadly—form the circulatory system of every economy. They do not provide food or shelter directly, but make it possible for these essentials to flow. When organised as commons, financial systems become shared infrastructures that enable communities, cooperatives, and small businesses to provision life’s necessities on their own terms.
Mutual Credit Networks
One of the clearest demonstrations of this is mutual credit. Though many informal, small-scale LETS schemes have gradually faded, the Community Exchange System (CES) still connects over 80,000 users in 1,200 local exchanges across 105 countries. The business-to-business (B2B) barter industry—the corporate version of mutual credit—remains strong, with an estimated annual trade volume of between $12 and $14 billion worldwide.
In Sardinia (Italy) for instance, Sardex created a regional exchange network through which thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) trade goods and services without euros. Launched in 2009, it helped keep the local economy alive during the eurozone crisis, when liquidity dried up and many family businesses faced bankruptcy. By fostering reciprocity among members, Sardex has helped relocalise trade and strengthen solidarity among its SMEs.
Though Sardex is strongly committed to its members and social purpose, it remains a privately owned company—raising questions about governance and accountability. In the UK, Local Loop Merseyside seeks to take the same principles further by building a cooperative mutual credit system owned and governed by its SME members. Where Sardex demonstrates that mutual credit works at scale, Local Loop shows how it can be structured as a commons.
Community Currencies in Africa
In Africa, the Sarafu Network takes a different approach by using community currencies. Blending ancient local practices of mutual aid (chamas) with modern technology (mobile and blockchain), it enables communities to issue and exchange vouchers—effectively commitments to provide labour, goods, or services in the future—through shared commitment pools. These pools, governed by neighbourhood committees, work like local trust banks: transparently recording who has contributed, redeemed, and fulfilled promises over time.
Stewarded by the Grassroots Economics foundation, the system has been active since 2010, with a mobile version launched in 2017 and blockchain integration added in 2020. Since then, it has supported tens of thousands of low-income households, primarily in Kenya, but also increasingly in other African countries.
Time Banking for Elder Care
Finally, Japan’s Fureai Kippu system (“caring relationship tickets”) provides a powerful example of time banking at the national level. (A time bank is essentially a mutual credit system using hours instead of a monetary reference unit). Volunteers can earn credits by helping elderly people in their community, which can later be redeemed for care for themselves or their relatives.
Created in 1995 by the Sawayaka Welfare Foundation, it has since been recognised and supported by the government. This official recognition has allowed it to scale nationally: credits earned in one part of the country can be redeemed elsewhere. Surveys show that seniors often prefer Fureai Kippu care over standard services, citing the more personal nature of relationships fostered by the system.
When Commons Connect: Scaling in Practice
As we saw in Part 3, the Commons scale in two ways: by federating similar initiatives into wider networks, or by integrating diverse projects into an interoperable ‘commons economy’.
Federation
Federation allows each community to retain autonomy while pooling resources, expertise, and political voice.
In Nepal, the Federation of Community Forestry Users Nepal (FECOFUN) is one of the largest federations of natural resource commons in the world. Established in 1995, it unites more than 23,000 community forest user groups, collectively managing some 2.4 million hectares of forest—nearly one third of the country’s forested land—and involving over 3.1 million households. Through a multi-tiered governance structure, it links local users and stewards with national institutions, securing both livelihoods and ecosystems while giving communities influence over policy.
In irrigation, the acequias of New Mexico are bound together through the New Mexico Acequia Association (NMAA). This federation allows each acequia to retain control over day-to-day operations while pooling resources for challenges like legal disputes and drought planning. A similar pattern can be found in the more than 3,800 Swiss Alpgenossenschaften (“alpine pasture cooperatives”) which have governed shared grazing lands for centuries. Local associations manage seasonal rights and obligations, while regional and national federations coordinate ecological standards and even collective marketing of alpine products such as cheese (Alpkäse).
In housing, over 500 CLTs form part of the national CLT Network in the UK, which provides legal frameworks, political advocacy, and mutual support to members. In Uruguay, the FUCVAM federation brings together more than 600 housing coops, while the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada (CHF Canada) represents some 2,200 coops with around 250,000 residents. Through federated governance and solidarity finance, they protect housing from market pressures while amplifying the reach of individual projects.
A more radical example is Germany’s Mietshäuser Syndikat, a cooperative joint venture model that links over 200 housing coops through a unique legal and financial structure. Each coop is co-owned by its members and the Syndikat, which holds a “golden share” preventing the sale of property back onto the market. Surpluses from established coops—which operate autonomously—fund new ones, thus creating a self-reinforcing growth cycle.
Finally, Spain’s Mondragon Corporation shows what happens when federation extends across entire sectors. Founded in the 1950s in the Basque Country, it has grown into a network of over 90 worker coops employing more than 70,000 people. Each cooperative is democratically governed by its workers, while pooling resources through shared financial institutions, research centres, and educational networks. Today, Mondragon is Spain’s tenth-largest business group and spans finance, industry, retail and knowledge, with total sales exceeding €11 billion in 2023. Unlike many large coops that drift towards conventional corporate models, Mondragon’s federated structure has so far enabled it to scale globally without abandoning its cooperative principles.
Integration
Integration happens when multiple commons across different sectors are woven together into a single, generally place-based economy.
In the UK, Totnes pioneered the Transition Towns movement in 2006 by linking local projects in food, energy, housing and the local economy into a holistic model for community resilience.
In Belgium, the city of Ghent commissioned a Commons Transitions Plan in 2017 that mapped nearly 500 initiatives across food, housing, care, and digital sectors. The plan suggested a comprehensive roadmap for the city to re-imagine and reconfigure its structures around citizen participation and the sharing of resources. Though the proposals were never implemented, the plan generated international attention as one of the first attempts by a city to treat the commons as a serious governance model—and many of the mapped projects remain active today.
And finally, in Stroud (UK), the emerging Stroud Commons initiative offers a vivid experiment in consciously building a modern “commons town”. Members are developing practical models to bring key services—housing, food, energy, water, care, and, yes, even climbing!—under community ownership. Their slogan, “Own it together. Make it affordable. Keep it forever.” perfectly captures the core principles of the new commons movement.
Conclusion: Seeds of a New System
The commons take many forms.
Some are entirely independent; others are hybrid, forming alliances with municipalities, governments, or ethical market actors; and others yet may not even be commons in the strict sense. Some are ancient institutions that have survived for centuries, while others are more recent, born of digital tools. Some remain small and hyperlocal by design; others scale across regions, and even globally.
What unites them is shared use, collective care, and—though to varying degrees—participatory governance. This reminds us that there is not one model to follow, but rather a rich diversity to be celebrated and built upon.
Entire books have been written about commons in practice. Here, I have only been able to offer a glimpse. Yet I hope even this brief survey shows that the Commons is alive and vibrant, that it can be found everywhere, and that it cuts across cultures and domains.
Up next (Sunday, 12th October): we’ll close the series by exploring how cities, institutions, and citizens can actively engage to create the conditions in which the Commons can thrive.
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Before You Go…
This Substack is written by and for people who want to reimagine the way we meet our needs—with practical, concrete actions that have real-world application. We are part of a growing alliance of individuals, communities, and organisations determined to seed and grow the Commons across different domains.
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