Shared Abundance
Building the governance infrastructure for collective prosperity.
Centuries of Success
The evidence assembled refutes any claim that commons governance cannot function at scale or in modern contexts. Across civilizations, commons have operated successfully for centuries—often millennia—when institutional conditions support cooperation.
700+
years
Swiss Alpine Commons
Village communities governing alpine meadows, forests, and irrigation—continuously operating since at least the 1300s.
1,000+
years
Valencia Water Tribunal
Eight canal communities managing irrigation, meeting every Thursday at noon since approximately 960 CE.
400+
years
Japanese Forest Commons
59,209 community-based organizations managing customary forests since the Edo period.
1,000+
years
Balinese Subak System
1,559 associations coordinating rice cultivation through water temples since the 9th century.
Measurable Outcomes
Modern empirical research enables systematic comparison between commons-managed, state-managed, and privately-managed resources—and the results consistently favor community governance.
Lower deforestation on indigenous lands vs non-protected areas
Nature Sustainability, 2021
Of Amazon deforestation occurred outside indigenous territories
FAO/FILAC, 2021
Nepal forest cover after community management (1992-2016)
NASA-funded Landsat research
Foreclosure prevention by Portland Proud Ground CLT over 26 years
CLT research, 2022
The Path Forward
What the evidence shows is that humans have repeatedly demonstrated capacity for sophisticated collective governance of shared resources—and that this capacity was systematically attacked, not organically abandoned.
The contemporary opportunity is to rebuild that capacity with modern tools: cryptographic verification, programmable governance, transparent accounting, and composable institutional design.
Ostrom's design principles—clearly defined boundaries, collective-choice arrangements, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution mechanisms—are not abstract ideals but practical patterns that have governed resources across cultures and centuries.
What the digital age adds is the capacity to encode these principles in software, making them portable, auditable, and composable. A community in Portugal can adopt governance primitives tested in Kenya; a forest commons in Japan can share monitoring protocols with watershed stewards in California.
The Real Question
Every sector facing automation, every ecosystem under extraction pressure, every community watching wealth drain to distant owners confronts the same structural question: will productive capacity concentrate further, or will we build the governance infrastructure for shared abundance?
The choice is not between efficiency and equity—commons governance has repeatedly demonstrated that distributed stewardship can match or exceed centralized management while distributing benefits more broadly.
The question is not whether commons can work at scale.
The question is whether we will build the exclosures that protect them.
Building Together
At Closer, we are building the infrastructure for shared abundance. Our regenerative villages unite technology, community, and nature through:
- →Web3 governance encoding Ostrom's principles into transparent, participatory systems
- →Token-based membership creating clear boundaries while enabling global participation
- →Regenerative land stewardship protecting ecosystems from extractive pressures
- →Community ownership models where benefits circulate among participants
The infrastructure for scaling self-governance now exists. Join us in building commons exclosures that protect communities and ecosystems—creating abundance rather than scarcity.