Autonomous organizations

The SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) describes reduced inequalities, with a fair share of resources, as a foundation for a sustainable society. But what paths that lead to a more equal society is not as certain.

In contradiction to the more commonly adopted perception that regulation and financial incentives are the tools we should lean on and use, the Nobel prize of economy winner in 2009, Elinor Ostrom, shows that polycentric governance and autonomy is the way to successfully manage common interersts and resourses in the long term.

By studying successful collaborations Elinor Ostrom has shown that, like the self-organizing phenomena in natural eco-systems, humans can collaborate and manage common resources in a sustainable manner without governmental interferance, if they are able to meet and work out their own rules of how it should be done.

Self-organization is also the ideology behind cryptocurrencies: When, during the 2008 financial crisis, governments used tax money to bail out big banks that had acted unsustainably, Satoshi Nakamoto went to work to create a decentralized economic system - a currency unaffected by corruption, central banks and debt securities, and which instead owned by the users.

In 2009, Bitcoin was launched with the following text carved into the first mined block: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” - a clear signal that the new currency aims to bypass dependence on a third party.The launch of Bitcoin has been followed by crypto-solutions that, among other things, allow shared ownership (Non Fungible Tokens) and flat self-governing organizations (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations).

But despite the fact that the ideology behind these new solutions aims to democratize ownership and decision-making rights, it often falls flat when these solutions are implemented.

In recent years we have seen manipulation and bankruptcies of major crypto initiatives such as FTX, The DAO and Luna among others.

Implementing the self-governing organization that can contribute to an equal and sustainable society is easier said than done.In collaboration with a number of municipalities, universities and authorities, applicants in the project want to explore which hypotheses and criteria are necessary to take into account in the design of a self-governing organizational form in Sweden.

The project leans on previous research on self-governing organizations and takes inspiration and learns from crypto-based solutions, contributing a needs- and user-centered perspective.

The project´s goal is to create the basis for developing and testing a first version of a self-governing organization in Sweden - an organizational form that is not built around hierarchies and where competition is trumped by cooperation.

Since Sweden´s citizens are the target group for the organizational form, the study is carried out around identified challenges in municipalities.