The Northland Solar Commons Living Lab: A Case Study in Piloting Place-Based Peer Governance of the Sun’s Commonwealth for Regenerative Community Economies

Keywords: Solar Energy, Community Economy, Commons, Infrastructure, Peer Governance
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 4

Abstract

At the global scale, the 2021 UN Climate Agreement meeting in Scotland is part of a process where earth citizens watch national leaders co-create a set of rules by which the shared common wealth of the earth’s atmosphere can be peer-governed as a commons. At global and local scales, crises of capitalism and ecosystems demand experimentation with peer governance of common wealth and livelihoods that bypass market economies. The Solar Commons Research Project (SCRP) aims to show how the sun’s common wealth can be shared through solar energy panels that create a revenue stream to support peer-governed mutual aid work done by and for local communities. This paper provides a case study of the “living lab” methodology used by SCRP in Northern Minnesota. SCRP follows and extends an energy research practice used by the EU’s Joint Research Council to study how to meet EU climate action standards over its diverse jurisdictions. The EU sets up “living lab” pilot projects that are sensitive to local laws and customs and engaged with local energy user experience even as they seek to create overall standards. Similarly in northern Minnesota, SCRP engages state and treaty jurisdictions as well as traditional indigenous values in its local trust agreements and peer governance tools. SCRP is a joint research project of the Bois Forte Ojibwe Food Sovereignty Group (BFFSG) and University of Minnesota researchers aiming to co-create agreements and governance tools that work well for BFFSG and provide standards allowing Solar Commons to iterate in other communities.