Les pratiques de commoning pour nourrir la régénérescence des SCIC ? Le cas d’une coopérative culturelle

Multistakeholder cooperatives (SCICs in French law) hold out the hope of a participatory and democratic revival to meet local needs. As alternatives, however, they are subject to a process of degeneration that jeopardizes their political project and democratic functioning. Within the literature studying the practices and processes that organizations put in place to combat this degeneration, SCICs occupy a marginal place. Yet their multi-stakeholder nature, social utility and local roots make them a resilient form with strong potential for regeneration. Our paper is in line with this approach, and proposes to explore the regenerative practices of SCICs by comparing this literature with that on commoning, seen as a process of collective organization around a common resource, regulated by co-constructed rules in perpetual adaptation. By carrying out an ethnographic case study of a cultural SCIC in a phase of organizational regeneration, we propose to see commoning practices as strengthening SCICs' capacity for regeneration. We then identify the modalities of commoning, such as the creation of conditions for inclusive participation, the elaboration of evolving frameworks, democratic revisibility, and we define cooperation as continuous learning requiring a perpetual reinvention of its frameworks and rules.