Cap & Share or Mutualize

"Sharing" is a matter of pooling the resource and allocating it without necessarily calculating everyone's individual benefit in discrete units. By contrast, "mutualization" is a more precisely qualified or quantified benefit, usually based on some predetermined formula or agreement. In the commons it is key, that these agreements are being made by those who have a stake in the resource system.

While Pool & Share works everywhere, Cap & Share or Mutualize is particularly useful for 'managing'/ 'dealing with' collective but limited resources if you want to treat them as a commons and not trade them as a commodity.

# Why Cap & Share or Mutualize but D'ont Trade?

We believe that Cap & Share or Mutualize is far superior to/more powerful than the Cap & Trade approach. When markets or bureaucracies use a policy regime that is disconnected from on-the-ground ecological realities -- e.g., ignorant of the actual carrying capacity of an ecosystem or reliant on politically motivated or arbitrary usage caps -- ordinary people will not heed ecological realities and will instead respond to the bureaucratic rules or market signals. A prime example is fishery quotas set by government agencies, which are not respected by fisherpeople and often violated.

Storify - we would need to add two examples: One on how "cap and trade" is being ignored or undermined (there are many of them) and the other one how cap & Share or mutualize works And this is actually very common: We could take irrigation systems, they all cap and share. It would just be great to take a very old and still working one -> Stwitzerland/ Italy or the acequias in Mexico... just one, but one we can storify

# Examples

Cap & Share or Mutualize is arguably the most prevalent pattern of commoning in the world today. The International Land Coalition estimates that up to 3 billion people around the world rely on about 8 billion hectares of land governed by traditional, community based ownership systems webpage , which tend to be systems of Cap & Share or Mutualize.

discuss this example and also the following elements, which I think contribute to make the distinction in terms of value and philosophy very clear.

# How is this Different from Cap & Trade?

- caps are decided upon directly be the users - mutualizing instead of trading prevents corruption