• What is the problem/issue being addressed?
The previous decade witnessed a wave of innovative approaches to democratic public ownership, particularly at the municipal scale. Rather than a paternalistic provider of services, such approaches – diverse in both form and application – variously recast the (local) state in a more facilitatory or partnership role, promoting participatory co-governance and/or co-ownership of resources and assets. There has been a proliferation of scholarship that has attempted to make sense of such initiatives, and to understand what potential they might hold for advancing just social-ecological transitions. This has resulted in a number of terminologically similar theorisations of organizational partnerships between the state and society – including public-common partnerships, commons-public partnerships, social-public partnerships, public-civic partnerships – and some broader conceptualisations such as that of the ‘partner state’ and the ‘becoming common of the public’.
Research and understanding of these organization forms is, however, nascent. Terminological similarity often hides substantial differences in the organisational forms under discussion. And whilst we can suggest this broad scholarship shares a general hypothesis that state-society partnerships might play a formative role in a just eco-social transition, there is lack of clarity concerning a) the specific nature and characteristics of the organisational forms that are considered part of this field, and b) what dynamics and features of such organisations lend themselves to supporting a dynamic of eco-social transition.
• Why is it important for society?
In 2021 the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) called for a ‘fundamental, system-wide reorganisation across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.’ Similarly, the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (2023) called for a ‘transition’ from ‘incremental to transformational adaptation’. For the IPCC’s authors, nothing short of a rapid and far-reaching transformation in how we live our lives would do. Dominant understandings of this transformation typically frame this as an intrinsically technical problem: how can we “unplug” our world system from one set of material and energetic inputs, and then “plug it in” to another? Policy options and forms of intervention are thus fundamentally prescribed, and others foreclosed, through this world-view. By focusing instead on governance forms and ownership approaches, this research explored how new forms of social property and collective democratic agency in the economy might be fundamental to non-technocratic and systematic approaches to ecological transition.
• What are the overall objectives?
This research aimed to advance our understanding of the institutional designs, social functions, and potential effects of hybrid models of public-social ownership to social-ecological transition. The objectives included a) developing an understanding of the different typologies of hybrid ownership, b) to advance a clearer theorisation of the dynamic of social-ecological transition, c) to advance a conceptual understanding of how hybrid models of ownership might contribute to such social-ecological transition.
