Like a commons rhizome (Part 1)
The Knowledge Monopoly
The degrowth project has reached an impasse. Some of its critics are not wrong. The movement has struggled to articulate a political economy that does not collapse into state-centric planning or naive voluntarism. It has failed to adequately address the Global South’s structural dependence on Northern coordination mechanisms, such as International Law, Global Finance, and Multinational Corporate Markets. Its stance on innovation remains ambiguous, caught between a legitimate suspicion of about ever-increasing efficiencies (and the associated Jevon’s Paradox) and an underdeveloped account of technology’s role in sustaining growth regimes. And its core redistributive policies face a wall of public resistance that many of its most prominent theorists have treated as a communication failure rather than a structural feature of liberal democratic societies. These are not dismissals of the degrowth concept, but they are demands for a more rigorous, globally conscious, and politically realistic framework. Each of these critiques points to the same root cause: a failure to imagine how we can coordinate society without appealing to the binary of the state or the market, which have both failed to bring about the changes that the world requires. What follows is an attempt to think through that failure from the ground up.
Interconnected Problems Require Interconnected Solutions
If the problem is architectural, meaning that these failures of degrowth build on one another, and are interconnected, then the solution must be architectural too. Throughout this piece, when I call something architectural I’m referring to anything that has a unified overall design, structural form, or organized framework. That means starting with first principles about how humans might organize differently. I take mine from the social anarchist perspective, that treats coordination as horizontal, voluntary, and grounded in place. This leads me to treat bioregions as the primary unit of ecological and cultural organization – not self-sufficient islands, but nodes in a rhizomatic network of federated mutual aid. But ‘network’ is too loose a word. To be meaningful, this interdependence requires relational structure.
Let me be precise about what I mean by federation; in this context I meant to describe a mode of coordination in which bioregions enter into voluntary, horizontally structured agreements to manage shared resources, resolve common problems, and provide mutual aid, while retaining full authority over their internal affairs. Unlike a federal state, a federation in this sense has no central sovereign, no monopoly on legitimate force, and no binding constitution imposed from above. It emerges from ongoing negotiation, continuous recalibration of agreements through feedback, and the shared recognition that certain problems (like climate stability, material budgets, or the knowledge commons) cannot be addressed at the bioregional scale alone.
Knowledge as Bottleneck
I ground myself in a simple proposition: the problem is not growth as such, but the specific coordination architecture that produces growth as an imperative. If we can change that architecture, the imperative for growth will dissolve. This might seem counter-intuitive until we consider that the coordination architecture of industrial capitalism is not primarily about material extraction, though extraction is its most visible symptom. It is about knowledge, by which I mean: who designs the machines, sets the standards, educates the engineers and business executives, maintains the logistics networks, and controls the scientific infrastructure that makes extraction and manufacturing possible. The Global South is dependent on the Global North not because it lacks raw materials, but because it lacks access to the coordinative systems that transform raw materials into useful things. This is the real bottleneck. And it is the real site of liberation. A degrowth proposal that does not dismantle this knowledge monopoly will simply reproduce dependency under a greener banner. A degrowth proposal that does opens the possibility of a genuinely post-capitalist coordination architecture.
If knowledge monopoly is the bottleneck, then the obvious remedy is to make knowledge unmonopolizable. That would be the function of a Global Open Technology Commons as a structural precondition for any genuine rebalancing. Every design, protocol, standard, piece of scientific data, manufacturing process, and educational resource is made freely available, forkable, and improvable by anyone, anywhere. For those not familiar with the concept, in the programming world, forking is when you take a piece of open source code that has been made available, and you adapt it to your local context. Your version then becomes available alongside the original. In this context, we can apply the concept to any open source project, without limiting ourselves to being online. This is not the old open source model applied to software alone. It is a comprehensive commons of productive knowledge covering hardware, biotechnology, construction techniques, energy systems, agricultural methods, and ecological monitoring. There are many local examples of this around the world already, such as the Tzoumakers Fab City Hub in Greece. With such a globally commons, federated so that each bioregion enters into the commons voluntarily and shared resources are managed according to horizontal agreements, while each region autonomously manages its internal affairs, knowledge scarcity would be structurally eliminated rather than merely being reduced to some arbitrary amount that still allows for structural inequalities to persist. The gatekeepers would disappear because there are no gates. Coordination architecture would be rendered geographically portable, institutionally agnostic, and culturally adaptable.
Required Systems
In order to envision how this might function, we need to enumerate and detail the systems that would facilitate such a commons.
The portability is realized through distributed manufacturing networks consisting of thousands of workshops , regional fabrication facilities, shared technical libraries, and peer-produced standards (each publishing their standards and practices openly and publicly to ensure they are all interoperable) create a global infrastructure of productive capacity that does not require central coordination. Stated more simply, this system lets people manufacture goods globally without relying on a single company, government, or supply chain to run the show. It’s like the internet, but for making physical objects—decentralized, open, and locally accessible. A community in the Andes can fabricate a water pump using designs refined in Southeast Asia, adapted to local materials, and improved through feedback from a network of users spanning five continents. And when you have a diverse network of federated communities all aligned on the same foundational principles without having specific requirements being imposed on them from above, the distinction between design and manufacturing, between innovation and replication, between North and South, begins to dissolve. This is the opposite of autarky. It is radical interdependence without hierarchy. In France, the RFFLabs network of Fab Labs has already demonstrated the power of distributed manufacturing. During the COVID-19 crisis, thousands of makers across the country spontaneously coordinated through shared protocols to produce emergency medical equipment. Offering a glimpse of what a federated production commons could achieve at scale
A Knowledge Labour Migration Project would address the human dimension of this transition. This can provide the skills transfer through mentorship models that explicitly avoid ownership of ideas. If we implement a system whereby engineers from industrial regions travel to communities that have been systematically excluded from technical education, not to impose solutions but to share best-practices or rules-of-thumb with the goal of cultivating capability instead of credentialing, we will be shifting to the recognition that knowledge is not a commodity to be transferred but a practice to be cultivated. This model has precedent. Global Skill Partnerships, supported by the World Bank, have demonstrated that training can be designed to benefit both sending and receiving countries. The Australia Pacific Training Coalition, for instance, has produced over 20,000 graduates while enabling a small fraction to migrate legally when they choose, thereby cultivating a bidirectional flow of capability rather than a one-way drain. This strategy treats expertise as something that exists as part of an interconnected community rather than as something a single person (or small group) has and can withhold from everyone else, and it operates in both directions: the Global North has as much to learn about ecological stewardship, low-energy living, and community resilience from the Global South as it has to offer in terms of technical sophistication. The flow is mutual, or it is nothing.
South-South Coordination
In a rhizomatic network, we can no longer accept the North as a hegemonic force. Fostering direct South-South coordination accelerates this process by removing the North as the default go-between and final decider for all planetary coordination. Bioregions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America must develop their own federated agreements, shared infrastructure, and mutual aid pacts without requiring Northern validation or participation. The North would then become a participant in a broader system rather than its central authority, rebalancing the historical structure of global coordination that has been a bottleneck, rather than a conduit, for Southern development. Removing that bottleneck does not require Northern sacrifice. Following the 2023 Brazzaville Summit, countries from the Amazon, Congo, and Southeast Asian tropical forest basins are actively developing a confederal governance model for cooperation on climate, biodiversity, and water systems. The initiative explicitly emphasizes “inclusive governance” and “strengthened South-South cooperation,” with recent policy proposals exploring how to translate political commitments into a structured institutional framework linking the world’s three largest tropical basins.
But the dependency runs deeper than coordination alone; it is also monetary. The architecture of global finance, with its debt regimes, currency hierarchies, and structurally unequal exchange rates, has systematically transferred value from South to North for centuries, long after formal colonialism ended. A truly federated framework must therefore include mechanisms for mutual credit systems, resource-backed regional exchange, and the gradual decoupling of Southern economies from Northern financial institutions. The ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development and India Exim Bank have been practicing this for two decades. Their $1.14 billion partnership across West Africa exemplifies how Southern institutions can build infrastructure and capacity without Northern intermediaries. Removing the knowledge bottleneck is essential, but it must be accompanied by the dismantling of financial dependency . This, also, does not require Northern exclusion. It requires Northern recognition that its coordination monopoly is not a type of service but a form of capture, and that its financial supremacy is a symptom of extraction.
In Part 2, we will discuss the questions that remain. Namely, how such a federation might actually be governed, how its material limits would be enforced, and how it could emerge from the world as it is, rather than the world as we wish it to be.
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