← VI — The interdependences of wellbeing

VII

Contents

Creating relational abundance

How can we create abundance together and sustain our relationships?

A diverse group of people gather around a large outdoor wooden worktable, building, drawing, sharing food and drink, playing guitar, and gardening together.

The word abundance is often understood as having much, more than enough, of something: resources, capital, control, and reserves for later use to satisfy our needs in case conditions might change. In the system we have created, secure claims over land, housing, savings, tools, and other material resources are treated as among the safest ways to extend one’s agency through time, reduce dependence on another person’s permission, and provide a fallback against crisis or coercion.

Ownership, however, does not organise only the relation between a person and a thing; it also organises relations among people around that thing. The right to possess, use, manage, or transfer something gains much of its force from the corresponding power to exclude others from it. Where the things at stake are finite, rivalrous, or scarce, one person’s security of possession can therefore narrow another person’s access.

But full individual ownership is only one way such claims can be organised. Rights to access, use, withdraw from, manage, exclude others from, or transfer a resource can be separated and distributed among different people or groups rather than concentrated in a single owner. Ownership is therefore not the only way to organise secure relations with what we value.

Ownership, access, and use are different relations to a property or resource. Any one of them may be insufficient to support abundance for those who have them. Ownership of land without the means to use it can remain sterile; access without security can remain precarious; use without ownership may nevertheless provide substantial and durable benefit. In this understanding, abundance emerges from the quality and security of the working relations through which people connect resources, capabilities, and infrastructure in ways that allow them to meet their needs.

Relations of abundance begin with gifts, many of which cannot be exhausted by ownership: language, care, knowledge, and much of what makes life itself possible. When what sustains us is encountered as a gift, we are placed with it in an unfinished relation of gratitude, restraint, reciprocity, and return. But reciprocity need not mean repayment. We receive far more than we could ever return to its original givers, while what we receive can enlarge our capacity to sustain others in turn, creating networks of giving and receiving in which need and contribution are distributed unevenly across persons and across time.

Here a paradox appears. If the value of a gift is remembered, calculated, and returned as an equivalent, it risks falling back into the logic of transaction. Its value cannot therefore be reduced to an account that can eventually be settled. And yet the gift cannot be indifferent to the receiver: what is offered becomes sustaining only insofar as it actually responds to needs and can be received as such. Relational abundance depends on whether what we give and receive enlarges our capacity to participate, to care, and eventually to give again.

In networks where people gift each other what they need to collaborate in meeting their needs, they create the possibility of a relational abundance that comes into existence through the relation itself. People can enter compositions that increase their power of acting, and heterogeneous capacities can combine in ways that enlarge what participants are able to do together beyond what each could achieve alone. Collective activity can develop capacities for coordination, problem-solving, and creativity that depend upon patterns of interaction among participants rather than residing fully in any one of them. Relational abundance therefore does not only help produce material outcomes; it can also generate relational goods: goods whose production and enjoyment depend upon participation with others and cannot simply be acquired independently of the relationships through which they arise.

In other words, working together while keeping differences in resources and capacities visible can help people meet needs that none could meet as well alone. And it can be fun. Shared work can produce food, shelter, knowledge, and care, but also friendship, laughter, play, trust, excitement, and the pleasure of discovering what becomes possible together. The relation, then, is not merely a channel through which existing resources move. It can itself become a condition for capacities and forms of enjoyment that did not previously exist.

For as productive and enjoyable as it might be, relational abundance does not sustain itself. Durable commons depend on people agreeing how something may be used, where its limits lie, how decisions are made, how conflicts are addressed, and how responsibilities are shared. Those arrangements can themselves distribute abundance or depletion. The labour that keeps common life possible—care, maintenance, coordination, cleaning, and repair—takes time and energy, and can disappear from view precisely when it is reliably performed.

Fair contribution does not mean equal contribution. People differ in capacity, need, time, strength, health, skill, and circumstanceWild School synthesis · in conversation with Eva Feder Kittay and Sins Invalid.Kittay challenges models of dignity and autonomy built around independence from assistance, showing that dependency can coexist with self-direction. Sins Invalid rejects capitalist productivity as a measure of human worth and foregrounds differing bodyminds, needs and capacities. Neither source supplies the School’s rule for allocating labour in a commons.In conversation with ↓: Eva Feder Kittay · Sins Invalid
Eva Feder Kittay ↗ · Sins Invalid ↗; a commons that measures belonging by how much labour each person can supply merely recreates a productivity hierarchy inside collective life. At the same time, even sincere participants may perceive their own contribution as larger because their own effort is more cognitively available to them. Fairness therefore cannot rest either on equal contribution or on each person’s private sense of who is doing enough; it has to remain visible, discussable, and revisable in light of different capacities and needs. Shared does not mean free: a commons is sustained, and the time spent sustaining it is itself a gift to one another.

Creating relational abundance at the Wild School is an intentional aspiration for how we want to live and work together. Some practical commitments can help: make necessary labour visible; allow contribution to vary with capacity; share undesirable and powerful roles deliberately; periodically ask who is carrying what; give those affected by an arrangement real power to change it; and create ordinary ways to surface overload, resentment, or exclusion before they harden into the structure.

A commitment to relational abundance shapes how we think about the resources on which the School depends. Ownership still matters: it can protect continuity, autonomy, and security. But who holds title does not by itself determine whether land, buildings, money, knowledge, or tools can sustain a commons. What matters is whether the relations organised around them make access reliable, responsibilities intelligible, decisions contestable, and their use and care something people can genuinely participate in rather than something controlled at another person’s discretion.

The School experiments with an idea of abundance measured less by how much each of us has, and more by what we can create, sustain, give, receive, and enjoy together.

In conversation with

Ownership, access, and benefit

A. M. Honoré — incidents of ownershipReadClose

Honoré, A. M. 1961. “Ownership.” In A. G. Guest, ed., Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence: A Collaborative Work, 107–147. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Source ↗

Honoré analyses ownership not as simple physical possession but as a legal position composed of several distinguishable incidents. These include rights or powers relating to possession, use, management, income, capital, security, transfer and duration, together with duties and liabilities. The analysis shows how features commonly concentrated in an owner can be conceptually separated rather than treated as one indivisible relation to a thing.

Edella Schlager & Elinor Ostrom — bundles of resource rightsReadClose

Schlager, Edella & Elinor Ostrom. 1992. “Property-Rights Regimes and Natural Resources: A Conceptual Analysis.” Land Economics 68(3): 249–262. DOI: 10.2307/3146375 ↗

Schlager and Ostrom distinguish operational rights to access a resource and withdraw its products from collective-choice rights to manage the resource, exclude others and alienate some rights. They use this schema to distinguish authorised users, claimants, proprietors and owners. Their analysis shows that substantial and durable resource rights can be distributed across people or groups without either collapsing into open access or requiring every right to be concentrated in a single full owner.

Jesse C. Ribot & Nancy Lee Peluso — access as ability to benefitReadClose

Ribot, Jesse C. & Nancy Lee Peluso. 2003. “A Theory of Access.” Rural Sociology 68(2): 153–181. DOI: 10.1111/j.1549-0831.2003.tb00133.x ↗

Ribot and Peluso define access as the ability to derive benefits from things, a broader question than whether someone holds a recognised property right. They trace how people gain, control and maintain access through rights but also through capital, markets, labour, technology, knowledge, authority, identity and social relations. Their framework therefore explains both how someone may benefit without owning and how formal ownership may fail to produce practical benefit.

Bina Agarwal — gendered property / effective controlReadClose

Agarwal, Bina. 1994. “Gender and Command Over Property: A Critical Gap in Economic Analysis and Policy in South Asia.” World Development 22(10): 1455–1478. DOI: 10.1016/0305-750X(94)90031-0 ↗ · Open text ↗

Agarwal examines women’s command over property in South Asia and distinguishes legal rights, actual ownership and effective control. She argues that independent and effective land rights can affect economic security, bargaining power, fallback options and vulnerability, while formal household ownership may leave women without meaningful control. The article also considers different institutional forms, including individual and group rights and usufruct, rather than equating security with a single private-title model.

Gift, reciprocity, and receiving

Robin Wall Kimmerer — gift economy / abundance and reciprocityReadClose

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2022. “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance.” Emergence Magazine. Essay later expanded into The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (Scribner, 2024). Source ↗

Beginning with the harvesting of serviceberries, Kimmerer contrasts commodity and resource framings with receiving the living world as gift. In her Citizen Potawatomi-grounded account, gift generates gratitude, reciprocity and responsibility rather than terminating relationship through acquisition. She also connects abundance with restraint and enoughness, while acknowledging real labour, cost and episodes of material scarcity rather than treating gift as free or limitless provision.

Robin Wall Kimmerer — gift relation / Honorable HarvestReadClose

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions. Relevant sections: “The Gift of Strawberries” and Honorable Harvest material. Source ↗

In “The Gift of Strawberries,” Kimmerer describes gift as an ongoing relationship rather than a free transfer whose meaning ends once something is acquired. The Honorable Harvest material develops related disciplines of taking through need, restraint, gratitude, respect and return. Kimmerer presents these teachings through her own scientific, family and Citizen Potawatomi intellectual grounding while noting that different peoples articulate practices of respectful taking differently.

Alasdair MacIntyre — dependence / networks of giving and receivingReadClose

MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1999. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Chicago: Open Court. Source ↗

MacIntyre begins from human vulnerability and dependence rather than from an image of fully self-sufficient rational agents. He describes social life through “networks of giving and receiving” in which what people can give depends partly on what they have received and in which giving often goes to people other than those from whom one previously received. The relationships he describes are not governed by strict proportionality or calculative repayment and extend across changing needs and capacities over a human life.

Jacques Derrida — gift / reciprocity paradoxReadClose

Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Given Time I: Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226851181.001.0001 ↗

Derrida asks whether a gift can remain a gift once it enters recognition, gratitude, debt, reciprocity or return. He argues that the very identification of something as a gift can draw it back into the circularity of economic exchange by generating a symbolic equivalent or obligation. The resulting paradox is not a recipe for pure altruism but a philosophical interrogation of whether the gift can ever appear fully outside economy.

Joan C. Tronto — care / responsiveness and powerReadClose

Tronto, Joan C. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge. Relevant material: Chapter 5, “An Ethic of Care.” DOI: 10.4324/9781003070672-8 ↗

Tronto treats care as a social and political practice rather than only an intention or sentiment. She distinguishes caring about, taking care of, caregiving and care-receiving, the response that indicates whether care has actually met the need it was meant to address. Her account links these phases to attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness while examining paternalism, unequal power and the social distribution of care work.

Composition, collective capacity, and relational goods

Baruch Spinoza — composition / power of actingReadClose

Spinoza, Baruch. 1677. Ethics, Part IV, Proposition 18 Scholium (IVp18s). Source ↗

In Part IV of the Ethics, Spinoza asks what increases or diminishes human power of acting. In the scholium to Proposition 18 he argues for the usefulness of human association and gives the example of individuals uniting in a way that composes a more powerful individual. The passage belongs to Spinoza’s wider ethical account of power, reason and common advantage rather than to a modern empirical theory of teamwork.

Gilles Deleuze — encounters / composition and decompositionReadClose

Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Source ↗

Deleuze develops Spinoza’s ethics through the relations bodies enter into with one another. Encounters can compose compatible relations and increase a body’s power of acting, or decompose existing relations and diminish that power. The ethical question therefore concerns what kinds of encounters and compositions a body can enter rather than obedience to a moral law imposed from outside.

Anita Williams Woolley et al. — collective intelligence / group interactionReadClose

Woolley, Anita Williams, Christopher F. Chabris, Alex Pentland, Nada Hashmi & Thomas W. Malone. 2010. “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups.” Science 330(6004): 686–688. DOI: 10.1126/science.1193147 ↗

Across two studies involving 699 participants, Woolley and colleagues gave small groups a range of different tasks and found a general factor associated with performance across those tasks. This collective-performance factor was not strongly explained by the average or maximum intelligence of group members and was associated with interaction-related features including social sensitivity and more equal conversational turn-taking. The finding concerns variation among groups; it does not show that groups inherently outperform individuals.

Inga J. Hoever et al. — diversity / perspective taking / team creativityReadClose

Hoever, Inga J., Daan van Knippenberg, Wendy P. van Ginkel & Harry G. Barkema. 2012. “Fostering Team Creativity: Perspective Taking as Key to Unlocking Diversity’s Potential.” Journal of Applied Psychology 97(5): 982–996. DOI: 10.1037/a0029159 ↗

Hoever and colleagues experimentally examine whether team diversity produces creativity by itself. Their results show that diverse teams produced more creative work when members engaged in perspective taking and elaborated the information available in the group; diversity without those interaction processes did not automatically yield the same creative advantage. The study therefore treats creativity as dependent on how differences are brought into relation, not on diversity alone.

Carole Jean Uhlaner — relational goods / participationReadClose

Uhlaner, Carole Jean. 1989. “‘Relational Goods’ and Participation: Incorporating Sociability into a Theory of Rational Action.” Public Choice 62(3): 253–285. DOI: 10.1007/BF02337745 ↗

Uhlaner develops a rational-action model in which people can receive “relational goods”: benefits or objectives whose value depends upon interactions with other people rather than on separately consumable private outcomes alone. She uses this addition to analyse political participation and mobilisation, showing how sociability can change the incentives to take part in collective activity.

Benedetto Gui — relational goods / encountersReadClose

Gui, Benedetto. 2005. “From Transactions to Encounters: The Joint Generation of Relational Goods and Conventional Values.” In Benedetto Gui & Robert Sugden, eds., Economics and Social Interaction: Accounting for Interpersonal Relations, 23–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511522154.003 ↗

Gui treats face-to-face interaction as an encounter that can produce relational goods alongside the conventional outputs of an economic activity. Some benefits of an encounter are jointly generated and experienced within the interaction rather than being fully separable objects that one person possesses beforehand. Gui also allows for negative relational outputs, so the framework does not treat interaction itself as necessarily beneficial.

Commons, maintenance, and differentiated contribution

Elinor Ostrom — commons governance / institutional durabilityReadClose

Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511807763 ↗.

Ostrom compares long-enduring systems through which users organise common-pool resources themselves. Across her cases she identifies recurring institutional features including defined boundaries, locally fitted rules, user participation in rule changes, monitoring, graduated sanctions, accessible conflict-resolution mechanisms and recognised rights to organise. These are comparative findings about institutional durability rather than a claim that commons govern themselves automatically or that one design works everywhere.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles — maintenance / sustaining workReadClose

Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. 1969. Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE”. Source ↗

Ukeles contrasts “Development,” associated with novelty, progress and individual creation, with “Maintenance,” the repeated work of keeping, cleaning, supporting, renewing and preserving what life and development require. She links maintenance to domestic and low-status labour and declares her own maintenance work to be art, making activity normally treated as background necessity visible as cultural production.

Eva Feder Kittay — dependence / autonomy through careReadClose

Kittay, Eva Feder. 2011. “The Ethics of Care, Dependence, and Disability.” Ratio Juris 24(1): 49–58. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9337.2010.00473.x ↗

Kittay challenges accounts of dignity that make independence from assistance their model of human worth. She begins from ordinary human vulnerability and periods of dependence and argues that assistance can be a resource that enables a fulfilling and self-directed life rather than evidence of deficient personhood. Her account also keeps the needs and lives of both cared-for people and caregivers in view rather than treating care as a symmetrical exchange among equally situated persons.

Sins Invalid — disability justice / interdependence and accessReadClose

Sins Invalid. “10 Principles of Disability Justice.” Official organisational statement; framework developed within the disability-justice movement. Source ↗

Sins Invalid’s ten principles present disability justice through intersectionality, leadership by those most impacted, wholeness, sustainability, interdependence, collective access and collective liberation. The principles explicitly reject measuring human worth through capitalist productivity and insist that people have different bodyminds, needs, histories and capacities. This is a movement-based political framework rather than an empirical study of communal labour.

Michael Ross & Fiore Sicoly — contribution bias / egocentric availabilityReadClose

Ross, Michael & Fiore Sicoly. 1979. “Egocentric Biases in Availability and Attribution.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37(3): 322–336. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.37.3.322 ↗ · Open text ↗

Across five studies involving discussion groups, married couples, basketball teams and laboratory groups, Ross and Sicoly examine how people remember their own and others’ contributions to joint activity and assign responsibility for shared outcomes. Participants’ own contributions were generally more readily recalled, and people often claimed more responsibility than others attributed to them. The studies support availability as one contributor to egocentric responsibility judgements without establishing it as their sole cause.