Loanership: the library model for economic management

Loanership: a library-like commons model for social and economic management        
Loanership is a use and return, rather than consume and discard, economic model that is based on the understanding that all resources, be they natural or manufactured, that are available to us humans, depend on a comprehensive set of societal inputs, and so the resulting outputs are owed  in return to the broad range of societal recipients. The roads we all drive on for our personal destinations are foundational examples. We "borrow" them when we use them. At a moment in history when we are confronted by apocalyptic challenges, environmental and technological, loanership offers an opportunity for doing economics in a sustainable way, without wasteful duplication.

Responsibility requires us here to first acknowledge that the above model does not cover all aspects of the economic process. Primarily, and most obviously, loanership addresses distribution/exchange rather than creation  but we argue that its base in the commons idea provides a conceptual framework for managing production, too. Here, however we focus more on what happens to products after production, a process currently anchored in a competitive model of profit seeking that inevitably leads to continuous extraction and depletion. Instead of self-interest, loaner-ship, as in libraries, is designed to preserve what we have while enabling its broad use. All members of a community contribute to, and draw from, their common pool. Trust and reciprocity are the informing principles that, appropriately governed, produce the social benefits of freedom and collectivity.  

Secondly it must be acknowledged that not everything necessary to social life can be processed without consumption, food most obviously.  But consumption reduces resources from higher to lower levels of material organization, e.g. from organic nature to carbon, loanership minimizes resource degradation. Its above limitations are not fatal for the model in that they provide a vision that can be applied to all areas, even when not directly.    

The more we can conserve, or even enhance, while using, the better it will be for nature, and for us as part of nature. In recent years here in Toronto and across the globe we have seen the library model of ownership applied to several areas (seeds, tools, musical instruments) beyond its narrow traditional niche of cultural products like books. The more we can loan rather than own/enclose/appropriate the more healthy will be the planet we live on and are part of. As the proven classical embodiments of the loanership  model libraries have a potential for societal transformation that has barely begun to realize itself.