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Community ownership is a broad term that refers to shared ownership and decision making over local assets, resources, or services, typically for the purpose of ensuring economic, cultural, and social benefits for its users. However, the forms of community ownership and concepts about what constitutes “ownership” are diverse and depend greatly on context[1][2] . In cases of community ownership, “community” generally refers to people on the ground, rather than governments or the ruling class[1] . This article will address the origins of community ownership, forms of community ownership, and emerging issues around community ownership.

Origins of community ownership

Common grazing land below the Black Mountains which can be seen in the background. Copyright Philip Halling and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons License.

The stewardship of collectively held resources by communities for shared benefit and survival dates back to early human settlements around agricultural or spiritual sites. In these early days the idea of personal “ownership” extended to personal belongings, such as tools, whereas land was treated as a communal resource and land-based activities (such as food production) were directed towards collective benefit[1]. Concepts of land ownership, control, and conquest spread through with the Roman Empire, to be increasingly replicated by a growing ruling class, monarchs and religious institutions[1]. Since then, globally the enclosure and privatization of land has become common, with a marked acceleration of privatization beginning during the Industrial Revolution and capitalism.[1]

In response, in recent centuries community ownership has become a means to protect and secure local control over community resources, and resist land and resource enclosure privatization, growing inequality, poverty, and wealth and ownership gaps[1][2] . Depending on context, the form that community ownership takes may draw on long histories of Indigenous traditional economics and ways of being[3], Black cooperativism[4], community organizing and other forms of solidarity economics[2].

Forms of community ownership

Community ownership has many diverse forms. Woodin, et al.[1] propose the following as some of those forms:

  • Common and customary ownership. This form is also sometimes referred to as a commons, referring to community resources governed through defined stewardship customs and agreements[5]. This form includes early approaches to communal stewardship that was directly connected to livelihoods. These instances of common or customary ownership may lack formal or legal owners, but still secure open access to a collectively held resource. Some examples include common land, forests, and water sources.
  • Cooperatives and mutuals. These are entities (often legally recognized) that bring together an association of members to meet community needs through a democratically controlled enterprise or entity. Key characteristics of cooperatives are that they are linked by a set of principles, and that they are democratically governed and jointly owned by their users[6]. Different types of cooperatives may have different names depending on their context and country, but common names and types include producer cooperatives, savings cooperatives, worker cooperatives, social cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, housing cooperatives, and multistakeholder cooperatives[6]. Examples of cooperatives include Mondragon Corporation, Cooperative Home Care Associates, Organic Valley, COOPELESCA, and many more.
  • Community ownership. This is a broad category encompassing many forms of local efforts to bring resources or assets under community control in order to meet community needs. Components of community ownership may include legal ownership, varying forms of governance including voting, community decision power, and financial benefits (such as locally accruing revenues)[7]. Examples include the community ownership of land, such as community land trusts and real estate investment trusts, as well as the shared ownership of other assets, such as community equity endowments and democratic investment funds[2]. Examples of this include the Boston Ujima Project Inc. and the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. Community ownership can also be extended to community based services, such as the provision of decentralized renewable energy such as LUMAMA, a community-based and owned solar mini-grid in Tanzania[7].

Emerging issues in community ownership

With increased digitization, community ownership of intangible assets, such as data, information, knowledge, and culture, has also taken on new relevance. Within the digital realm, market concentration, digital exclusion, insufficient data governance and erosion of self-determination are some concerns that forms of digital community ownership seeks to address[8].

Forms of community ownership described above, such as a commons or a cooperative, can also be used to secure community control of digital assets. Some examples of this include:

  • Digital commons, which de Rosney and Stalder[9] define as “a subset of the commons, where the resources are data, information, culture and knowledge which are created and/or maintained online.”  Examples include Wikipedia, open source software, and Creative Commons licenses.
  • Data cooperatives, which are a form of cooperative that creates democratic and collective control over “the design, collection, processing, pooling, management, analysis, and/or sharing of data[8]” Examples include the Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative and MIDATA.
  • Platform cooperatives, which are a digital platform (i.e. an online application or website) that provides and/or sells goods and services and is owned and governed by its users, workers, or other stakeholders[8]. Examples include Stocksy and The Drivers Cooperative.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Woodin, T., Crook, D., & Carpentier, V. (2010). Community and mutual ownership: A historical review. In UCL Discovery. Joseph Rowntree Foundation. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1474803/1/community-mutual-ownership-full.pdf
  2. ^ a b c d Marx, R., Theodos, B., & Taylor, T. (2025). Community Ownership and Self Determination: Case Studies from Atlanta, Boston, Lisjan Territory, and New Orleans. In Urban.org. The Urban Institute. https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2025-05/Community_Ownership_and_Self-Determination.pdf
  3. ^ Thunder, J., & Intertas, M. (2020). Indigenizing the Co-operative Model. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Manitoba Office (pp. 6-36)
  4. ^ Gordon Nembhard, J. (2015). Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. Penn State Press.
  5. ^ Frischmann, B. M., Marciano, A., & Ramello, G. B. (2019). Retrospectives: Tragedy of the commons after 50 years. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 33(4), 211-228.
  6. ^ a b Bouchard, M. J., Carini, C., Eum, H., Le Guernic, M. & Rousselière, D. (2020). Statistics on Cooperatives: Concepts, classification, work and economic contribution measurement (M. J. Bouchard, Ed.). International Labour Organization. https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—ed_emp/—emp_ent/—coop/documents/publication/wcms_760710.pdf
  7. ^ a b Schneider, S., Abraham, A., & Yetano Roche, M. (2025). Community ownership models for decentralised renewables in the global south: a review and research agenda . International Journal of Sustainable Energy Planning and Management, 46, 58–77. https://doi.org/10.54337/ijsepm.8621
  8. ^ a b c Bühler, M. M., Calzada, I., Cane, I., Jelinek, T., Kapoor, A., Mannan, M., Mehta, S., Mookerje, V., Nübel, K., Pentland, A., Scholz, T., Siddarth, D., Tait, J., Vaitla, B., & Zhu, J. (2023). Unlocking the Power of Digital Commons: Data Cooperatives as a Pathway for Data Sovereign, Innovative and Equitable Digital Communities. Digital, 3(3), 146‑171. https://login.library.smu.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/unlocking-power-digital-commons-data-cooperatives/docview/2869293721/se-2?accountid=13908
  9. ^ Dulong de Rosnay, M., & Stalder, F. (2020). Digital commons. Internet Policy Review, 9(4). https://policyreview.info/concepts/digital-commons