Sufficiency values through commoning relationality: Exploring a network of community initiatives in northern Greece

In the face of ever-accelerating climate change and ecological degradation, the concept of sufficiency has been proposed as a way to achieve socio-ecological sustainability. Sufficiency implies limits on consumption and production, thus making it incompatible with capitalism’s notion of constantly increasing production and expansion. Commoning as a social practice is argued to contrast capitalist practices and relations. Therefore we propose a confluence between sufficiency and commoning. Using the concept of organisational values we explore how a sufficiency aligned value system emerges in the network of commoning organisations in northern Greece. Our findings illustrate how the network’s organisations come together in deep relationality to create an alternative value system in contrast to dominant capitalist values. This deep relationality with the local socio-ecological context is grounded on a shared worldview among the organisations’ members. Central to this worldview is a commitment to an alternative economic system, one explicitly oriented away from capitalist profit-driven logics and towards sustaining the work, relationships, and communities in which the network’s members are embedded. Sufficiency values are thus incorporated into relational practices of commoning. As such, they can scale-wide and reproduce across the network’s organisations, expressing the fulfillment of societal needs within the local ecological boundaries. Beyond the network's boundaries, this capacity for scaling-wide may extend to other organisations and networks, carrying the potential for broader collective action to oppose and transcend capitalism and, ultimately, for the emergence of a sufficiency economy.