Run a Common: four traps
This short reflection stems from a collective conversation held in Riga during the BASICC project and identifies four recurring pitfalls that many commons face in their everyday life. Rather than offering solutions, the text invites readers to reflect on how conflict, participation, power and economy are navigated in common spaces—and how they can quietly undermine the very principles these spaces claim to uphold. The traps are not exceptions; they are part of the terrain. Recognising them is the first step to building stronger, more honest commons.
Commons often carry an ideal of harmony, but conflict is part of any shared process. The first trap lies in treating disagreement as something to fix or avoid. Instead, the authors suggest reading conflict as a message - something that reveals unspoken tensions, contradictions, or blind spots. Conflict can act as a resource: a signal that something important is at stake. When handled collectively and openly, it can help the group grow, rather than fragment.
The second trap is subtler: while many commons emphasise open decision-making, participation can become a surface process. Beneath it, individuals or subgroups may pursue their own interests, often instrumentalising others in the process. This “double instrumentalisation” creates a mismatch between appearance and intent. The key is to ask openly: why is each person involved? What is personal, what is shared - and when do the two begin to clash?
Even in commons that value horizontality, power dynamics don’t disappear. Some voices carry more weight; some people become informal leaders. That’s not necessarily a problem—but ignoring it is. Without intentional strategies to balance influence, the commons risks becoming quietly hierarchical. The author urges to ask regularly: who is listened to, and who isn’t?
The fourth and perhaps most insidious trap is commodification. As commons grow, they can gain real estate value, attract funding, and professionalise their activities. Over time, they risk adopting the very market logic they set out to resist. To resist this slide, commons must develop their own economic language and critique - not only to sustain themselves, but to actively question the dominant economic order in which they operate, in order not to become functional contributors to the very system they hoped to challenge.
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