Reference: More-Than-Human Governance Experiments in Europe Hub: IMRC Canon
P. 15
“For instance, if a river has rights, who is responsible for making those rights tangible for it?
It also raises new types of questions regarding enforcement and social contracts. In some of the projects, like the work of Dark Matter Labs in imagining a new social contract around the River Don, there is a move away from a courts-based view of enforcement. Rather than viewing the state as a guarantor with central enforcement, it requires a mindset shift towards mutual obligation, where peer-to-peer enforcement is recognised. This ties in to one of the other reflections regarding the idea of having more of a living’ agreement rather than a static contract.”
I’ve been wanting to put this in dialogue with the Afropesssimist (Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson) critique of rights-based logic, that civil rights always appeal to a logic of exclusion, but as an anarchist this idea of mutualistic enforcement appeals to me a ton.
I have to wonder, when I hear “peer to peer” and “living contract,” how web3 maps onto this. What are the optimal conditions for a DAO as “an alliance of care” (Maria Lucia Cruz Correia on 16)
In the “representation based” section on 16-17, the report ultimately concludes that citizens groups being assigned species to learn about could easily lead to presumption to represent/make designs that would be out of turn. Furthermore, in these examples the citizen assemblies were merely performative and would require a lot of attention and process to pass any government sanction. Assuming there is path through the first problem, the second is a rich place for federated DAOs or other organization structures that could receive their own “commons” funding rather than public funding, bootstrapping their legitimacy until public money follows. This is a mutualist path - if, as a group, we are able to build a process of legitimacy for something like the citizen assemblies, it would be possible to use the high definition auditability, transparency and federability of DAOs to build incentive based networks to fill just this role.