LField research carried out on the African continent contributes to making visible multiple citizen initiatives, some of them very old, and which all carry the seeds of an endogenous model of development.
The Cameroonian philosopher and historian Achille Mbembé recently made the following observation: “faced with the tangle of crises [en Afrique de l’Ouest]electoral democracy no longer appears to be an effective lever for the profound changes to which new generations aspire,” and it is necessary to “betting on substantive democracy”backed by “new social, intellectual and cultural coalitions” (The world, August 4, 2023). This research confirms that this “frantic quest for alternative development models” that Achille Mbembé evokes is already largely in action.
Following a tradition opened by the winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009, the political scientist Elinor Ostrom, these initiatives can be qualified as “commons”, a designation chosen to characterize entities having the characteristic of allowing administration, based on forms of ownership and shared uses of goods and material or immaterial resources, in complete autonomy.
Cooperatives resisting commodification processes
These commons are unique in that they allow a group of people or communities to meet all or part of their essential needs, while protecting their environment, whether they are peasant groups or housing cooperatives. , cultural hybrid places or collaborative digital platforms.
These varied and multiple “common” initiatives are deployed primarily as palliative solutions when both the market and public intervention mechanisms are insufficient or absent. This is the case, for example, of associations of drinking water users in the peripheral districts of Kinshasa, or of cultural hybrid places in African cities.
In other circumstances, we see cooperative forms asserting themselves in resistance to processes of individualization and commodification. These include, for example, housing cooperatives in Burkina Faso or Senegal, which allow precarious and middle-class populations to secure housing in contexts of speculation and individualization of access to urban land.
The African commons, original and innovative structures
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