Regen contribution systems and variable property rights
In which I consider a regen-inspired type of property right that has variable security of title, conditional upon outcomes observed through contribution systems. Intended to incentivise high-quality land stewardship.
Coordination Failure
It is becoming widely accepted that our current systems for coordinating — the market and institutions — do not reach every sphere of activity. Many community efforts create value but that value stays local and remains invisible except to those directly experiencing it. Whether value is recognised has consequences for what is rewarded, protected, cultivated, prioritised, cared for, and built on. Resources that were once stewarded by a community can become prone to exploitation or neglect under our familiar institutional and market conditions.
Valuation Failure
An urgent and important example of this relates to how we value nature, including biodiversity and land management. There is a movement arising in on-chain communities called “regen” or “ReFi” that is developing various approaches to solving this, using phrases like “positive sum games” that can be hard to decipher (see Austin Wade-Smith’s essay on ecological institutions for an excellent overview). In this article, I suggest one mechanism based on dynamic property rights, using a contribution system.
A New Institutional Approach
Contribution systems are a key technology that can bring tangible design possibilities to the emerging regen movement. These have arisen not in response to climate change but through the more mundane necessity within online communities (including DAOs) of how to align people on a shared mission and reward them for their efforts. These missions are taking place outside the typical construct of a firm, often in a permissionless organisation that is open to join and open to leave.
Time Consistency
Contribution systems are a computational means of recognising value. Think of academic citations that trace the lineage of ideas, ascribing value. A software product called SourceCred was one attempt to do this for a wider array of contributions. That particular system used a graph-based structure to represent people and their actions, and an algorithm that assigned value based on the dependencies between actions — whether something was liked, built on etc. The system was designed to compute across social consensus according to a local community’s priorities. One fascinating feature was that, if something you did years ago was suddenly picked up, you’d find yourself receiving rewards again even if you’d left (for the full story see my ethnography of SourceCred)[1].
A more straightforward example is Protocol Guild. The Ethereum network doesn’t assign a portion of its fees for maintenance. While the Ethereum Foundation awards grants which enable client teams to pay people, developers could earn much more for building apps on Ethereum than for maintaining the infrastructure. To resolve this coordination failure, Trent Van Epps developed a system whereby people can donate or projects can pledge 1% of their native tokens to Protocol Guild. Those tokens get sent to a single wallet. The developers in the Guild then decide among themselves who is a valid contributor and rewards are weighted according to each contributor’s time working on the protocol. In this case, contributors end up with a basket of tokens that vest from projects, which provides an incentive to continue participating. Protocol Guild essentially uses a contribution system as a way to ensure commitment to the continued development of the Ethereum protocol.
Ecological Contribution Systems
Contribution systems are generally described as a means to reward labour — where value is derived from the inputs into production. I think they are much more than this. These systems are a new way of assigning value that goes above an individual worker’s input and collates a group’s notion of what is valuable that can extend through time. What does this have to do with biodiversity and land management?
During a recent Stanford CodeX Future Law workshop, an attendee from Ecuador told me of his community’s project to create biocultural credits, which are based on sustainable ecological practices of Indigenous people across 10000 hectares of jungle. A part of their model was a contribution system for the ongoing restoration and preservation of the land. Like others building contribution systems, this group was hoping to reward people’s contributions and find a way to fund their endeavours, but it opens up other possibilities, including devices that ensure biodiversity into the future.
Different ways of managing land across time already exist. Indigenous peoples have done it through kinship networks and ritual. Monarchies have done it by governance through hereditary decent. Farming families do it through inheritance too. Even the most positive examples only work until someone in that chain can’t or won’t do the job. How do we ensure continuity?
I own (with Jason Potts) a small patch of land in the sublime Rees Valley (NZ) that had been neglected for more than 30 years when we purchased it. During the 1880s it had been planted with European trees that, over time, had crowded out native species. Our repetitive efforts of removing invasive species from this land left me thinking — in a moment of exhaustion and frustration — that maybe that land should have been taken off the former owners. A visitor from the Department of Conservation told me it would have seeded far greater destruction throughout the valley and beyond had it not been for the efforts of neighbouring landholders (and their animals!). There was a time inconsistent coordination failure on valuation.
In a recent paper, Carsten Hermann-Pillath discusses what it would mean to consider the human-nature relationship as one of reciprocity. A gift economy “that expresses an enduring relationship between the giver and receiver” rather than appropriation and compensation. He suggests that ritual (pure action that has an ordering factor to it), which is performed by humans and non-humans, can unite our human property of land with non-human territoriality and should be at the core of our governance. Such governance, I contend, requires a contribution system — possibly based on ritual rather than labour — that includes humans and non-humans on that graph and calculates intersubjective value. The notion of ritual matters as it moves away from impact measurement and reward and recognises that often it is ongoing mundane maintenance that is needed (Protocol Guild also recognises this).
Such a system would help us to coordinate a reciprocal relationship with nature, including ritual actions of land management that are performed by networks of people and non-humans learning off and responding to each other, putting animals to graze when required, sharing knowledge of plants, water and fire. New versions of carbon credits are not the answer[2]. However, we can design systems where actions taken now result in value for future generations by making local knowledge and contributions legible. That looks something like a graph of obligations and dependencies, weighted by those according to their local knowledge of what is needed. Non-humans might be included in this graph (a tree, for example). When the contributions stop then it’s time to sell, give or loan that land to those who will do better. This mechanism does not abandon private property, but would have a weakening effect on it; if you don’t uphold your side, there would be consequences — a return to easements, or the commons.
The amended private property right I am describing here aims to resolve the problem of extraction or neglect. It also acknowledges that putting land back into public hands is not always the answer as governments too can get things wrong. As my neighbour Iris Scott at Rees Valley Station has written: “It sometimes feels as though we have a change of landlord every three years… it’s hard to believe that only twenty-five years ago the government of that time was encouraging intensification of farming in the high-country. Now this policy would be considered anathema by most”. She cites the QEII Trust as a good example of what can be done, whereby landowners receive some support for regenerating land and in return provide public right of way over that land.
Exclosure
Jessy Kate Schingler defines exclosures as ‘self-defending spaces of autonomous logics’. They are a class of systems design and institutional design that seeks to preserve localised value and practices but possessing a membrane that enables them to interface with legal rules.
A regen initiative such as I have described is an exclosure in that it needs to have its own logic that is based on that place, its species and the community (including animals) that perform mundane weeding, seeding and other rituals. It might have an interface that enables it to coordinate with other such local efforts around the globe and be made partially legible to institutions. In addition to legal structures such as property and easements, there might be consequences for risk/insurance, industry, food sovereignty etc.
Unlike a social credit system, a contribution system is not a totalising system of measurement but something that can be imbued with its community’s priorities and practices. They can be used to put more information into markets and make existing property systems more variable, in the process building defences around localised practices and value. The result could be that the hardest land regeneration sites become the most attractive because of their potential for improvement over time.
Conclusion
John Locke’s homesteading principle described the origins of property as being established through appropriation and labour. Douglass North located property rights in legitimacy and institutions. Can we reengineer these notions so they orient forwards in time? One such possibility might be creating a private property right that diminishes when native biodiversity is depleted. Such a system would need a way to record contributions and to govern — a collective agreement over what is valuable not just now but for future generations. Rather than arguing over which type of property is best (commons, private or public), we might instead strengthen and weaken those rights over time to create self-defending ecological systems.
About me
I am a Professor at RMIT University and an Australian Research Council-funded Future Fellow working on the project “Cooperation Through Code”. My research is examining permissionless systems (including public blockchains) using ethnographic methods. I am also a Research Director in Metagov.
This piece is in part a reflection arising from the Standford CodeX Future Law Institutional Ecologies workshop that I attended online in April 2024. Thanks to Tony Lai for the invitation. This video is a great summary of the conversation.
[1] After they’d left the project, co-founder Dandelion said to me that one of its flaws was that it was unable to see negative contributions and deduct from people’s Cred score. My proposal for a diminishing property right would require this adjustment.
[2] Working with Sophie Hartley has informed my view on this.
