Decentralizing Power: The Only True Democracy
What is peace? If one is a Kantian, one will say it is fusion into a higher entity. The peace of treaties and intertwined interests, eternal peace, the peace which, honestly, never works....
But if one is a Tocquevillian, one will think rather that peace is leaving others in peace.
— You believe that Saint-Firmin's interest is to connect to the rest of the network. You may be right — no doubt you are. But it so happens that the inhabitants of Saint-Firmin judge otherwise. Are they stupid? Possibly. But that stupidity is their own. It seems long matured. It therefore possesses a value in itself. That is why I am in favour of letting Saint-Firmin make its own mistakes. You cannot make people intelligent against their will. You must let them make their own experiments. Who knows? They might surprise us.
— This is about protecting the population.
— Protection? But this gentleman is perfectly right: they are adults. If they were granted the right to vote, it is so that they use it and decide their own affairs. Tocqueville speaks with nostalgia of the village assemblies which, under the Ancien Régime, met every week, deliberated on collective matters, and made decisions that had the force of law. In those days, there was less rule of law, admittedly, but more democracy!
In Romania, her parents were constantly subjected to blackmail by the local authorities to keep the permits needed for their garment factories. Maria would never have imagined such practices in France.
The journalists of the national press, always eager to buy back their conscience, loved the idea of a small local elected official fighting the Parisian elite to which they themselves belonged.
They made Maria into a touching Don Quixote, an unwitting embodiment of the degradation of public services. They were always disappointed to learn that she was not affiliated with a far-right party, which would have had, for their readers, the merit of simplicity.
They never transcribed her long declarations on the commons, no doubt judging that she was exceeding her domain of competence and that, if Elinor Ostrom had to be discussed, they had at their disposal a whole host of far more legitimate intellectuals.
Having become a livestock farmer by the sweat of his brow, without inheritance or capital, he cannot get over having had to give up processing his own milk following a health inspection that went wrong. He must now sell it to the cooperative for a miserable price and drags 25-year loans behind him. He feels cheated, mistreated, despised. He finds his lot all the more unjust as he has the feeling of doing everything by the book, discreetly, without ostentation. He raises his ewes in the open air, "like organic", he often quips, while firmly refusing to pay for the AB label, which he has renamed "the Bobos' Scam". He spends nights keeping watch during lambing. He plays France Musique continuously in the barn while listening to RMC and Sud Radio at home, as if the animals were entitled to more spiritual elevation than human beings. On the other hand, as soon as he sees a Parisian step out of their SUV, he gives a good kick to a ewe's flank to amuse himself with their outraged look. Matthieu is able to recognise each of his animals but never calls them anything other than their number. He considers that the elimination of all sentimentality is part of his professional duties. He allows himself only one tender gesture: hanging a little bell around the necks of his favourites.
Jobard is the complete opposite. On the labels of his products, one can admire silky-coated Normande cows grazing beside a stream, whereas his black-and-white Holsteins, milk robots, rarely see the light of day. Jobard stuffs his cows with antibiotics and methodically pours fertilisers and pesticides onto his fields. The Crème Jobard found in all the supermarkets of the region — "the cream of the bocage" as the logo indicates — Matthieu would not taste for all the gold in the world. "It's rat poison," he repeats. And yet Jobard is the king of CAP subsidies and drives a Mercedes. He is the one who won.
Léa has come to know the farmers' mutual insurance fund, the object of universal resentment. The risks of the weather they accept with fatalism, like all the generations that preceded them. The administration, the fanciful rules issued by Brussels, they end up tolerating the way one submits to a colonial power — with the vague pride, all the same, of being a citizen of the empire. But the MSA — they will never forgive it its always-too-heavy deductions, its always-unjust calculations, its always-incomprehensible answers, for they have the impression of being robbed by their own brothers, peasants like themselves, traitors.
Who could miss this world where the extreme comfort of a few — champions of progress on TV sets — implied the misery of a whole little people of obedient warehouse workers? How can we forgive the masters of our era the worst of deceptions: having made their servants believe they were free, that opportunities were equal for all, that the State protected the weakest, and that the order of things was just?
Power has darkened Maria. A modest power, admittedly, but do not all powers resemble one another — that of the President of the Republic as much as that of the Yanomami chief? Maria has had to contend with duplicity, indifference, selfishness, cowardice. Why did she persist, why did she persevere in the pursuit of her impossible commons?
There she is now, caught in the utopians' trap, seeking to impose generosity by constraint, goodness by force.
A former human resources executive who became, in Parliament, vice-president of the economic affairs committee, Boutaina Hadj is a figure of diversity that this government, always suspected of conservatism, urgently needs to showcase. A daughter of the Paris suburbs, raised in social housing with her four brothers and sisters, she got into one of those second-tier business schools that have become the last airlocks of meritocracy, the elite institutions now displaying "full". Her cheeky self-assurance earns her a certain cross-party respect. The press searches in vain for her past declarations on environmental questions. On the economic affairs committee, she has mostly shone through her defence of major infrastructure projects.
Some lament this succession of incompetents at the head of the ministry; others, more seasoned, welcome the media aura of their new boss, which could rouse certain dossiers from their lethargy.
Ambitions and anxieties can be read on every face. The lowliest deputy bureau chief calculates how the very long chain of appointments, promotions, transfers and leaves of absence might affect him. Admittedly, ministers do not have, as in the United States, the absolute power to appoint or dismiss the members of their administration. But everyone knows how things are done. This one will leave for the minister's office, that one will return from it; she will take over the direction of the Natural History Museum; he will lose the presidency of Météo-France. Each of these movements will generate a multitude of eddies in which some will drown and others will surface.
Only one thing seems certain: Martin's days are numbered.
...
Martin arrives at the office later and later, lunches longer and leaves earlier without incurring the shadow of a reproach. From his computer, he books restaurants and concerts, sinks into the LinkedIn news feed and plans his holidays. He lets himself be drawn into an Oblomovian nonchalance, endlessly postponing the work that remains and that seems overwhelming to him. Soon, he will be taking naps.
...
Martin discovers on the Le Monde website, which he now consults every five minutes to stave off boredom, a declaration by Boutaina Hadj classed among the "urgent" dispatches. The new minister has just revealed the full depth of her environmental thinking by declaring that "pesticides are like medicines: you need a little, but not too much." Bourioux, for all his cynicism, would never have said such nonsense. The FNSEA immediately hailed "a common-sense ecology"; the far left published a routine post denouncing "a neoliberal government sold to agribusiness".
Only a few weeks ago, Martin would have rushed to draft a press release in which, under the guise of clarifying the formula, he would have recalled the ministry's action to regulate phytosanitary products. His ambitions now in ruins, Martin better measures the vanity of his work. So many years of interministerial committees where, with his allies from Health, he battled against Bercy and the rue de Varenne to better control the pesticide metabolites that end up in groundwater; so many years sabotaged by a soundbite, a formula without rhyme or reason, a formula that has the appearance of common sense but continues to propagate the lie of a benign, restorative chemistry.
For the first time, Martin doubts the public service.
He wonders whether the Water and Biodiversity Directorate is not a mere screen to mask the extent of the damage, whether his colleagues too are holding back from thinking the unthinkable. In the end, what was he trained for at the ENA, if not to dress the chaos of life in a veil of rationality, to provide society with the arguments it needs so as not to take horror at itself?
Our pains, our errors, our crimes take on meaning in the boxes provided by the forms. The administration is a smiley placed on the absurdity of the world.
Laurent feels crushed at the prospect of entanglements with the Public Treasury. Who knows whether such revenues will not fall foul of some anti-money-laundering law, whether it will not be necessary to prove that each of the donors is not a Uyghur terrorist, whether the municipal council will not have to answer to suspicions of foreign interference? Such an unusual procedure, in such a tense local political context, can only cause trouble. As much as Laurent is capable of spending hours correcting a computer code error, the complexity of human laws terrifies him. He understands neither its logic nor its point.
I would like people to be left alone. For them to be able to live and die without being permanently monitored, measured, advised, guided, governed.
In a hurry to be done with it, he chose to be amused by all these classificatory refinements devised by the bureaucracy to frame, discipline and regularise life. Deep down, he thought indulgently, all these people are afraid. Afraid of what expresses itself, of what overflows, of what is. They are like the farmers with their pesticides: they would like to work on a nice smooth, clean surface; to handle only known and mastered elements following infallible protocols; and to watch perfectly aligned citizens grow before them, like ears of wheat. They do not understand the point of earthworms like us.
...
Arthur still nurtured the illusion that the human being might show through the inspector. Yet what made her human, fully human, was precisely the delectation she took in exercising her administrative power.
Arthur again perceived the gulf that already separated him from this generation that had grown up with "How to Blow Up a Pipeline", Andreas Malm's insurrection manual. In his day, no one wanted leaders. People still dreamed of anarchy and consensus voting.
— That's a bit what the Leninists wanted to do with the State. As a result, they never let go of power.
...
Had the cold monster of the ecocidal State begotten beings colder still? Would humans more human be born after them? Would the species one day rediscover the joy of living?
In a democracy, power grants its opponents the most vicious of privileges: the illusion of revolt. A tolerated revolt, comfortable and therefore benign. At least in Russia or China, one staked one's freedom on a tweet. Here, one merely exhausts it.
If we could sell our products at their true price, we would gladly do without the CAP. It is a subsidy for the consumer, not for the producer.
Matthieu had never hidden that he voted alternately for the right and the far right. He just wanted to be left to sell his cheeses, for his taxes to stop subsidising the idle, and to be left in peace for the rest. Yet the public authorities tormented him constantly. The DGCCRF tortured him over labelling questions, the DDPP asked him to fill in a nonsensical "foodstuffs handling declaration", and the CAP inspectors meddled in counting his flock. Last time, they had made a scene because a ewe born with atrophied ears was not wearing the regulation tag.
— Since she has no ears, where do you want me to stick her tag?
— Perhaps, but it's compulsory.
...
He had never read a single Rassemblement National leaflet, could not care less about immigration, but unhesitatingly gave his vote to those who, according to him, would raise "one hell of an almighty ruckus". His hatred of the administration, of its diktats, its intrusions and its cowardices outweighed every other consideration. All those who profited from it were classed among the collaborators without further ado.
He searches in vain for objections and counter-arguments. He would like to prove her wrong, to still believe in a certain rationality in the elaboration of agricultural policies over the last half-century, but he can no longer manage it. He admits that, behind the proliferation of nit-picking regulations, the essential may have been obscured; that the general interest may have been to the Séquoia tower what God is to a church — an echo that resounds everywhere but is heard nowhere; that this administrative wall he helped build serves only as a screen for thieves and poisoners. He slowly opens himself to the hypothesis that the Republic is only a fiction useful for war and commerce.
"I am still a civil servant after all: I can end my leave of absence whenever I wish and the administration will have to reinstate me in a post corresponding to my grade."
He realises with sincere astonishment his lack of real skills. He no longer quite knows what he can sell. He is not expert enough in engineering to act as project owner, not versed enough in hydrology to design a river development scheme, too little of a biologist to bring real added value to an ecological continuity restoration project. Martin does not have the energy to launch, as he could, a real business — raising funds, recruiting specialised staff, forging partnerships with associations, hounding his old contacts.
— The crayfish are back! Thanks to the fish ladder, of course. It always ends up being useful. You never know which species will benefit. That's the magic of nature.
Martin is seized by a doubt. Old memories of meetings at l'Écaille come back to his mind.
— The Pacific crayfish — isn't that an invasive species? he asks timidly.
— What I know is that it eats our little white-clawed crayfish. It's like the Chinese worms and the Asian hornets. There's nothing good in any of that. Martin still has work to do to reconcile what he knows with what he sees.
Martin no longer needs the gaze of others. He feels no anxiety about it. He is freed from that endless quest.
This rupture had freed him from many imperatives he followed out of habit and moral laziness. He had suddenly owned his own tastes and his own ideas.
Thus do beings escape from the straitjacket of regulations, forms and identifiers.
The emigrants would like to buy the plot from the municipality to build who knows what. But it is out of the question. The pasture belongs neither to the mayor nor to his council. It belongs to the inhabitants.
He discovers a practice at once very ancient in its foundations and very new in its scientific form: regenerative hydrology. Behind this intimidating name lies a very simple principle: making do with the water we have. Adapting our landscapes, our crops and our ways of life to what falls from the sky or flows underground, rather than vainly seeking to tame the elements.
Martin watches the conference talks on the subject on YouTube. There is talk of studies conducted on Bolivian farms, of watersheds and of keyline design, that method from Australia for laying out a territory according to the water cycle. In the videos, young researchers in sandals rub shoulders with grey-bearded veteran hippies. They form a sort of aquaphile sect, mixing chthonic metaphors with sharp epistemological concepts. Martin finds himself taking notes like a schoolboy.
He is well aware that, from his office in the Séquoia tower, he would never have given the slightest credit to these visionaries. At the start of his career, he took part in professional water trade fairs. It was a sort of hazing for any deputy bureau chief. He would spend his day on the ministry's stand, in the institutional hall, a blue-white-red badge hanging around his neck. His role consisted, amid an infernal hubbub, of responding to the sales reps who came to present their latest model of regulation valve, UV filter or chlorination machine, and who always had grievances against the regulations. At the very back of these immense prefabricated halls where the billions of euros of the water market were churned, one generally found a green pavilion devoted to "nature-based solutions", where a handful of activists discoursed on the self-purifying power of natural environments or the virtues of de-paving cities. Serious people like Martin never set foot in this no man's land, financed at a loss to defuse criticism and prove the organisers' open-mindedness.
Now confronted with a vital problem, Martin can no longer afford snobbery. He walks into the green pavilion. He pricks up his ears. He opens his eyes wide.
Sometimes, the aquaphiles go out into the field. They take over a farming cooperative, an eco-site or a communal wasteland and launch into a week of open-air works. It is a small army with its infantry armed with simple spades and its mechanical cavalry — excavators, dumpers, road rollers. They dig, pack, excavate, backfill, uproot and plant, in a frenzied atmosphere of pagan scouting. When they leave, the landscape is transformed. It has become covered with hedges, mounds, swales, banks, basins and saplings, revealing curved patterns that look like enigmatic geoglyphs but whose forms are mathematically determined to direct the flow of water and create natural reservoirs. Where the naive walker sees only an unkempt landscape, the aquaphiles imagine the interlacing of springs, brooks and ponds which will make it possible, with constant precipitation, to irrigate the crops, replenish the water tables and depollute the rivers.
Martin discovers the extent of barter, undeclared work, buildings without permits, arrangements on the quiet. The more the mayors are buried under circulars and forms, the more their constituents seem to live outside any legal framework, in a semi-anarchic state that Martin is not far from envying them. The countless standards that he and his ministry colleagues laboured to define trace a sort of abstract coherence, feeding administrations and consultants, but long since detached from any kind of reality. On the ground, people do not exactly disobey; they merely pretend to obey, which allows the inspection bodies to pretend to inspect.
Even in Léa's practice, officially a fifth-category "establishment open to the public", Martin could not help noticing that the accessibility and evacuation arrangements were ostentatiously botched and repurposed. Léa has posted a few unfinished diagrams and expired certificates at the entrance, half covered by a poster of medicinal plants. The compulsory green sign indicating the emergency exit has been placed above a Buddha niche. The law has become a comic object. If Martin had the time, he would write one last note for the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, where they so love to discuss the just law. He would title it soberly: "But who applies the law?"
— You must file a complaint!
That is all he can find to say.
— With the police? Are you out of your mind?
For Léa, the police boils down to the cops — the ones you always had to avoid on the estate, the ones who amused themselves with body searches when they came across girls, the ones through whom trouble came. A rival gang, hostile and powerful. That the cops might help her escapes her value system completely. Léa has always got out of trouble on her own, defended herself on her own, avenged herself on her own.
Martin repeats that it is a crime. Léa knows it well. But she has no desire to tell this story in a police station, still less before an assize court. No desire either to expose the details of the assault, or to defend her version of the facts, or to justify her attitude. She would feel as if she were being violated a second time. She prefers ice baths to try to erase the images that keep returning and keep wounding her.
— How would it help me for him to go to prison? He'll come back here, one day or another.
— You must do it for all the other women!
— I couldn't care less. I don't do politics.
— But what if you run into him outside? What will you do?
— Just thinking about it makes me want to puke. I don't know. It'll depend on the flow of energy. Maybe I'll flatten myself against a wall. Maybe I'll run away. Maybe I'll kill him with a good sharp piece of granite.
Léa does not look at all like she is joking. Martin is thrown. This is no longer about the Code of Territorial Authorities but about the Penal Code, the keystone of an organised society. It is as if the rule of law, with its noble procession of fair trials and proportionate punishments, did not reach the depths of the territory. As if justice were a matter of intimate considerations and its definition subject to each person's opinions. In that case, what remains for the State, the national community, the general interest, living together? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Martin realises that while his former classmates vie with one another in discussing institutional reforms, the Republic disappeared long ago, as discreetly as irremediably.
The concept of social ecology brought together absolute respect for nature with maximal decentralisation of decision-making processes, the municipality representing the primordial level of society. There would no longer be nations, only self-managed ensembles operating by direct democracy. For all that, Bookchin did not reject technology and advocated neither a universal return to the land nor the hara-kiri of the human species. He considered that humanity should organise itself in accordance with its natural dispositions — that is, through association, consensus and mutual aid. Just as nature tended intrinsically towards freedom, individual emancipation could only come from a peaceful relationship with the environment. To integrate into one's ecosystem was also to build the optimal form of sociability. Far from stifling them, communities would thus favour the emergence of singular personalities.
Martin also remembers that Elinor Ostrom received the Nobel Prize in economics just as he was starting his work at the Séquoia tower, within what was then still called the "Ministry of Ecology", destined to become successively, as political renunciations went by, the "Ministry of the Environment" and then, when all hope of rapid transformation had been abandoned, the "Ministry of Ecological Transition" — in other words, the ministry of that which will never come to pass (can one imagine a Ministry of Educational Transition?). The press had congratulated itself that a woman had finally obtained the supreme award, without dwelling too much on the substance of her thought.
A political scientist by training, Elinor Ostrom had offered an elegant solution to the tragedy of the commons, that old chestnut of economists according to which a scarce collective good in open access will inevitably be overexploited. Rather than entrusting the management of such a resource to the State or the market, Elinor Ostrom had discovered the existence of an alternative solution founded on the deliberation of the actors themselves. For example, fishermen confer and together draw up rules to prevent the fish stock from being depleted.
From the first pages of her book, Ostrom details the tragedy of the commons, an expression coined at the end of the sixties by a biologist, Garrett Hardin. If a common pasture is left open to all, each herder will graze as many animals on it as he can, so that the land will soon be exhausted and, in the end, everyone will have lost. It is therefore necessary either for the public authorities to organise grazing rotations, or for the allocation of private plots to incentivise each owner to manage his property better. It was on the basis of this reasoning that the British government undertook, from the 17th century onwards, to abolish all common plots. This enclosure movement precedes and prepares the rise of industrial capitalism by placing property rights at the heart of economic logic. As a good social democrat, Martin finds nothing to object to, except that ex post redistribution mechanisms will have to be provided for.
Ostrom recalls that the tragedy of the commons is itself inspired by the "prisoner's dilemma", a classic of game theory which shows that two economic agents held prisoner (that is, isolated from each other) will prefer to make sub-optimal individual choices rather than engage in a cooperation that would bring each of them more, but to which they cannot be sure their partner will submit. This dark vision of human relations, reduced to a perpetual bet on the other's betrayal, has fed public policy since the second half of the 20th century. A third-party actor must intervene to impose and guarantee cooperative mechanisms that will be in everyone's interest. Here again, Martin sees nothing extravagant.
It is then that Ostrom's stroke of genius intervenes, of such elegant simplicity. The prisoner's dilemma is indeed irrefutable — but on condition of being in a prison. Yet our society is not a prison. We talk to each other, we look at each other, we size each other up. We establish among ourselves a thousand informal conventions that allow us to live together. We can create trust through words, gestures and attitudes that escape the domain of contract. Faced with a common good whose use they share, economic actors able to communicate with each other, to discuss and to argue, should therefore find a way to come to an understanding, establishing by themselves the rules that will make it possible, to return to Garrett Hardin's scenario, to avoid overgrazing.
Ostrom's whole strength lies in illustrating this somewhat utopian theory with cases as concrete as can be. She draws them from history, studying systems of common management that survived floods, droughts, wars and epidemics, some of which endured for more than a thousand years. She also goes looking for them in contemporary societies. She is an explorer. She went to observe irrigation methods in Nepal, mountain villages in Switzerland, fishing communities in Indonesia. She conducted field studies in Kenya, Nigeria, Australia, Bolivia, India, Poland, Mexico and Zimbabwe. She investigated the police departments of Chicago, Grand Rapids, Nashville, Saint Louis and Indianapolis. At the University of Bloomington, in that backwater of Indiana where she taught for nearly half a century, she founded not an institute or a research centre but a "workshop", where students are asked to go into the field and craft their concepts from reality. Through all the concrete cases patiently collected by Ostrom and her teams, Martin sees rising before his astonished eyes the baroque and fascinating reality of human beings capable of organising themselves without civil servants.
The commons do not, for all that, constitute a space outside the law where Homo sapiens would have miraculously become virtuous. They are characterised, on the contrary, by the tenacity of their members in building a governance suited to their specific needs; ever-shifting institutions, defined and redefined through interminable deliberations, but which give birth to norms all the stricter for being drawn up by consensus. Just as the citizen of a State can generally count on the complicity of his peers to cheat or circumvent the law, so the user of a commons, made responsible by the management of a scarce resource, will not tolerate the slightest deviance. Sanctions are pitilessly implemented by the community itself. "The complete opposite of France, where motorists flash their headlights at each other to dodge the speed cameras," Martin says to himself.
Refusing to let himself be entirely convinced, he concedes that such a method might just about work for small, human-scale entities, but reckons it would become inoperative in the vast ensembles of the modern world. It is exactly at this crossroads of his intellectual journey that Ostrom lies in wait for him. At the end of the book, she describes the functioning of "polycentric" organisations that multiply autonomous centres of decision. This is proof indeed that one can grow without abandoning the principles of the commons. The essential thing is never to sediment into a centralised and rigid bureaucracy where theoretical expertise replaces empirical experience.
All the objections that come to Martin's mind are thus meticulously refuted by Ostrom, page after page, examples in hand. He has the troubling impression that the author is reading his thoughts and answering him directly. He then comes upon a seemingly innocuous sentence that petrifies him: "As long as a theoretical explanation showing the value of self-organising processes is not fully provided and accepted, major public policy decisions will continue to be founded on the illusion that individuals cannot govern themselves and need an external authority." In sum, Ostrom spent her life demonstrating why people like him, Martin, are not only useless but harmful. She bears him no grudge. No aggressiveness, no dogmatism in her writing. It is worse. She pities him — his naivety, his ignorance of anthropological truths, his so primitive belief in the virtues of an external authority that would organise society like God creating the world. She would almost apologise for having to open his eyes.
Scalded by the socialist State and disappointed by unbridled capitalism, it is not surprising that Romanians are looking for a third way. Ostrom suits them well. She is radical but not leftist. She detests charismatic leaders with their grand plans to save humanity. She remains influenced by the very liberal Hayek, by the whole public choice school. She distrusts administrators and engineers who would impose their cathedrals of synergies and their labyrinths of processes. She simply seeks to define the conditions of possibility of a spontaneous order, neither imposed from above nor disorganised from below. A timid, almost conservative ideal, which lets the different communities define themselves without dragging them by force down the road of progress. One need only see her with the King of Sweden in the photos of the Nobel reception ceremony. In the midst of an assembly of men in dinner jackets and women in long dresses, she wears a sort of shapeless African boubou with, as her only adornment, around her neck, an indigenous necklace made of shark teeth. She respects the customs, addresses the king as "Your Majesty", politely greets the prestigious guests come to applaud her, but her outfit is in itself a middle finger to several centuries of Western civilisation. Moreover, she does not even pocket the cheque, as if this money risked corrupting her. She gives it to her Bloomington workshop.
It was he who slammed the door of UCLA, the prestigious Californian university, when the academic hierarchy opposed his theories on the necessary decentralisation of urban policies.
Elinor Ostrom did not merely sign hundreds of unreadable articles. She is an activist. She trained entire generations of students in her workshop. She founded an intellectual movement, the Bloomington School, now abundantly cited in academic journals. She provided a methodological instrument, prudently decked out with an innocuous acronym, IAD, Institutional Analysis and Development; in reality, a powerful tool of subversion for transforming organisations. She established a vocabulary, that of the commons, which is today taken up by political actors around the world and which makes its way through our unconscious minds. In short, she planted a solid splinter in the foot of capitalism — not very painful, but impossible to remove, enough to make it limp and perhaps, one day, stumble. Ostrom in her boubou sends you her regards, ladies and gentlemen of the Nobel.
From his barn, Martin thinks he can divine the coming revolution. Just as Christianity conquered the world with a message as simple as love of one's neighbour, the Bloomington School posits, behind rather technical concepts and diagrams, a devastating principle: trust in others. One must trust. Postulate that the most modest citizens are capable not only of organising themselves on the ground, but also of deciding their own objectives together. It is true for the Spanish farmers of the huertas, it is true for the Turkish fishermen, it is true for the Los Angeles cops. The message is universal. The act of faith is unconditional. "Rather than imagining that some individuals are incompetent, malicious or irrational while others would be omniscient," Ostrom explains, "I postulate that human beings are all endowed with the same capacities for reasoning, which must allow them to grasp the structure of a complex environment and solve its problems." The complete opposite of what Martin learned at the ENA.
Or again: "The central goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in each of us." Until now, Martin thought the central goal of public policy was to prevent the worst in each of us from expressing itself.
This is no longer economics. It is a philosophy. It is a religion. Martin feels transported when, right in the middle of her Nobel acceptance speech, Ostrom starts to rhapsodise: "Trust. Repeat that word again and again." One imagines crowds in a trance, screaming "Trust! Trust! Trust!"
Martin knows that with this word, everything collapses. No more prefect, no more OFB, no more water agency, not even municipal utility management. Only human beings gathered together, deciding on the use of their resources and defining the best way to integrate into their environment. Ostrom denies proposing panaceas. She gives no turnkey solution. She does better: she enables people to find their own. She justifies, theoretically and empirically, the superiority of their own choices, even if the formulation of these is clumsy and incomplete. She provides a weapon against the quibbling of well-trained minds. This religion does not promise much, but it changes everything.
There remains then for Martin one decisive question, the ultimate touchstone of the Ostromian cosmogony: how to apply the principles of the commons to Saint-Firmin? The village's hydrological situation at the head of the watershed, its modest size and the looming crisis constitute, in theory, ideal conditions. Martin thinks, however, of his uncle with his cut-and-dried opinions, of Louis increasingly reclusive, of the faithful Liliane whose open-mindedness is not her first quality, of Matthieu resistant to dialogical thinking, of Mr Torricelli enamoured of plans and technique, of Salim whose collapsological passions are hardly aligned with the interests of the rest of the community. He cannot picture them debating calmly, rationally. However much he persuades himself, not without a certain intellectual humility, that he is prey to horrible centralising prejudices, he doubts. Trust?
Ostrom passed on to her disciples eight articles of faith for the functioning of the commons. To get to the bottom of it, Martin reviews them methodically.
Article one: Clearly define the boundaries of the group and of its resource.
No problem on this point. Saint-Firmin's land registry and electoral roll will see to it. It will only be necessary to settle the case of the architect from Argentan who, since her victory over the church bells, seems to be neglecting her mill, where she is seen only once or twice a month. Is she part of the group?
Article two: Adapt the rules of governance to local conditions.
Martin is aware of the scale of the task. Today, the only governance of water is the price of the cubic metre. To respect this article, it will be necessary to abandon the meters. To provide for schedules or quotas, discussing each person's needs at length. Will Miss Norton have the same water rights for watering her plants as Jobard for running his farm?
Article three: Ensure that all those subject to the rules also possess the power to modify them.
This is the most revolutionary and most obscure article in Martin's eyes. The heart of trust. Not only are the rules defined collectively, but they must be able to evolve spontaneously. Martin cannot picture such a mechanism. He is out of imagination.
Article four: Have the community's rules recognised by outside authorities.
That is to say, Nathalie. That will not be the hardest part. "Pray and sort yourselves out," the prefect had told him. He takes it as carte blanche.
Article five: Develop a system in which the members of the community monitor one another.
An unappealing but pragmatic article. Given the Saint-Firminois' informer temperament, Martin sees hardly any obstacle.
Article six: Establish graduated sanctions for offenders.
Martin knows the drawback of fines. The rich, like his uncle, will prefer to pay rather than respect rules that inconvenience them. They will buy the right to waste. It will therefore be necessary to be more creative. To provide for sanctions in the form of water restrictions, for example.
Article seven: Draw up a simple and accessible procedure for resolving conflicts.
We are not going to set up a tribunal, thinks Martin. It would in any case be illegal — an inadmissible infringement of the State monopoly on justice. But a mediation arrangement, such as exists for small disputes, would be perfectly conceivable.
Article eight: Distribute the responsibility for managing the resource across all levels, from the local cell to the whole interconnected system.
Martin interprets this article as a call to involve all the municipalities of the watershed. Why not, but at a later stage. If Saint-Firmin succeeds in its Ostromian revolution, it will be necessary to go back and talk to Alexis Huet, this time from a position of strength.
Martin turns articles two and three over and over in his head. He tries his hand at a few drafts of a local water charter. Nothing seems truly convincing to him. He feels like Alexander Hamilton drafting the great principles of the American Constitution, except that he has neither authority nor country. He wonders whether he has attained the wisdom of a founding father or whether, on the contrary, he is regressing towards childhood, inventing imaginary kingdoms for himself.
His powers as mayor are of no help to him. On the contrary, they constrain him by conferring on him, as an officer of the judicial police, responsibility for public order. Martin realises full well that he cannot change mores by decree. That was Maria's monumental mistake, her misreading of Ostrom. Martin understands what she must have faced: Jobard and his nitrates, Miss Norton and her watering cans, Salim and his water basins, and all the others. But how could she believe she would subdue them by her will alone?
Martin's prospects begin to brighten when he discovers the notion of the "public entrepreneur", first explored by Vincent Ostrom before his wife took it up. The public entrepreneur was the missing piece of the puzzle, absent from Governing the Commons. It makes it possible to trace a political path towards the emergence of the commons.
For Ostrom was never an anarchist. She does not underestimate the difficulties of coming to an understanding among equals. She knows the pitfalls of spontaneous order. She does not advocate a return to endless palaver. She admits that leaders emerge, that hierarchies form, that the community designates representatives to manage its daily affairs — half cops, half social workers. Trust, yes; laxity, no. Institutions must bring out the best in us, agreed, but also accommodate the worst. As Rousseau said, peoples of gods do not exist.
The public entrepreneur must act on his community like gravity on flowing water. He is the force that carries everything along without directing anything. He suggests without deciding, gathers without commanding, observes without surveilling. He distributes the floor, formalises the conclusions, allocates the roles. He makes sure that everyone is heard and that no one cheats. He facilitates consultation and verifies execution. He is a mediator, charged with finding the points of equilibrium. He obtains only one thing in exchange, something a little old-fashioned but worth all the titles: respect.
"That's it, I will be a public entrepreneur," Martin says to himself like a child dreaming of his future job. It is not for him to invent the rules. There will be no Hamilton in Saint-Firmin. On the other hand, it must be possible to fashion a community out of what is, for the moment, only a heap of scattered egoisms. It is now or never.
HUMUS - Gaspard Koenig (in French, no English edition yet)
AQUA - Gaspard Koenig (in French, no English edition yet)