Knowledge Atlas · Reference
Glossary & ontology
Terms are defined once and translated with care — terminology must survive translation intact.
C
- Charter city
- A new city created under a special charter whose rules differ from those of the host country.
- Checks and balances
- Institutional arrangements that let each branch or level of government limit the others, so that no single body can exercise power unchecked.
- Citizens' assembly
- A body of randomly selected residents who learn about an issue, deliberate and make recommendations.
- Citizens' Initiative Review
- A panel of randomly selected voters that studies a ballot measure, hears advocates and experts, and writes a statement for other voters.
- Civil disobedience
- A public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken to bring about a change in laws or government policy, usually with willingness to accept the legal consequences.
- Civil society
- The sphere of voluntary associations, movements, unions, churches and media that sits between household and state and outside both government and market.
- Collectivisation
- Pooling of land, workshops or firms into jointly managed units. It ranges from voluntary collectives, as in revolutionary Catalonia, to state-driven campaigns in which participation was pressured or compulsory.
- Common-pool resource
- A resource from which it is costly to exclude users and whose use by one person reduces what is left for others — e.g. fisheries, groundwater, pastures.
- Commons-based peer production
- Large-scale collaboration in which many people create shared resources, such as software or encyclopedias, without market prices or managerial command.
- Communalism
- A term with two unrelated senses: Murray Bookchin's programme of confederated, directly democratic municipal assemblies; and, in South Asia, politics organised around religious community identity.
- Communicative action
- Habermas's term for social interaction oriented to reaching mutual understanding by offering reasons that others can accept or contest, as opposed to strategic action oriented to achieving one's own success.
- Communitarianism
- In the 19th century, 'communitarian' described people who experimented with communal living, as in Owenite and Fourierist settlements. Today the word usually names a philosophical school stressing the community's role in forming individuals.
- Community land trust
- A nonprofit that holds land permanently for a community and leases it to occupants who own the buildings.
- Community of goods
- An arrangement in which members give up private ownership of property and draw on a common stock, usually on religious grounds, modelled on the Jerusalem church described in Acts 2 and 4.
- Community wealth building
- A local economic development approach that tries to keep wealth circulating in a place through local ownership, finance, fair employment, progressive procurement and community use of land, usually led by anchor institutions.
- Competitive governance
- The idea that jurisdictions should compete for residents and firms, as companies compete for customers, to improve rules and services.
- Condorcet paradox
- The finding that majority preferences can be cyclic: a majority prefers A to B, another majority prefers B to C, and a third prefers C to A, so no option beats all others.
- Confederation
- A union of sovereign members that delegate limited functions to common institutions while keeping the right to decide most matters — and often to leave.
- Consensus decision-making
- A process in which a group seeks a decision every member can accept, rather than a majority vote.
- Consociationalism
- A model of power-sharing democracy for deeply divided societies, combining a grand coalition of group leaders, segmental autonomy, proportionality and a minority veto.
- Constituent power
- The power of a people or founding body to create or remake a constitution, as opposed to the 'constituted' powers that act within it.
- Consul platform
- Free, open-source software for citizen participation (proposals, debates, polls and participatory budgets) first built for Decide Madrid.
- Cybernetic planning
- Managing an economy or state as a feedback-controlled system, using computers and data networks to collect information, model outcomes and adjust decisions in near real time.
- Cybernetics in governance
- The use of feedback, information flows and models from cybernetics to steer organisations or economies. Chile's Project Cybersyn (1971-73) is the best-known attempt to apply the idea to a national economy.