?Commons Beyond Development: The Strategic Value of the Commons as a Paradigm Shift?

MARISTELLA SVAMPA

Berlin

Conferencia; ECONOMICS AND THE COMMONS: FROM SEED FORM TO CORE PARADIGM; 2013

Heinrich Böll Foundation, Commons Strategies Group, Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation and Remix the Commons

In Latin America, said Svampa, the term that is mostly used to denote struggles to defend natural resources, biodiversity, water, etc., is bienes comunes. This term describes both the spaces and forms of social cooperation for using the usufruct of the production and reproduction of knowledge. Bienes comunes always refers to the shared codes of collective social life ? something that Gustavo Esteva, a Mexican scholar of the commons based in Cuernavaca, has called ?ámbitos de comunalidad,? which translates roughly as ?ambient spheres of the community,? meaning the whole of social relationships of a community. However, bienes comunes is the most widely used term in Latin America, and so she uses that term to speak about the commons (and avoids the even less helpful Spanish term ?procomún?). Professor Svampa noted that Latin America has been the focus of economic ?shock treatments? since the 1970s and 1980s, as described in Naomi Klein?s book on the topic. The basic goal of corporations and the state to shrink budgets for public spending and exploit natural resources through mega-?development? projects that end up harming the environment and displacing commoners from their lands.