Ep. 57: Primavera De Filippi on The Network State vs. Coordi-Nations, the Tragedy of the Commons as a Governance Challenge and New Institutional Structures for Global Cooperation

Primavera De Filippi is a researcher at several institutes, including the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Her research focuses on the legal challenges and opportunities of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence, with a specific focus on governance and trust.

Primavera is the author of the book “Blockchain and the Law,” published in 2018 by Harvard University Press (co-authored with Aaron Wright).

Primavera led a collective effort during Zuzalu (Vitalik Buterin's pop-up village in Montenegro) to offer an alternative to Balaji Srinivasan's "The Network State".

Her main critiques are its overreliance on market- and exit-based approaches.

This conversation highlights the differences, but Primavera cautions that there are more commonalities between these different approaches than differences. Most importantly, they share the goal to experiment with governance and approaches to sovereignty to improve on failures of the private and public sectors.

We start by defining the problem of the tragedy of the commons: individually rational behavior can lead to collectively worse outcomes.

There are three approaches to overcome the problem:

a) the Leviathan approach where a public authority manages the commons

b) the market-based approach with defined property rights and trade

c) the polycentric governance approach

The last one was developed by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom (the latter receiving a Nobel Price for her work) and is the starting point of Primavera's approach.

Niklas has more confidence in market-based solutions than Primavera, so a fruitful discussion ensues discussion the potential pros and cons of these approaches.

Both discussants agree that pluralism is the right way forward, trying out different approaches to solve issues such as climate change, immigration, or poverty.

The Coordi-Nations approach is encapsulated in a recent blog article, but it's just at the beginning of being formulated and will be discussed in future iterations of Zuzalu and within Ethereum/web3 and governance innovation circles.