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Tucked into the heart of San Sebastián's old town, Juan de Bilbao Kalea transformed into an open-air museum of street art, a living testament to the social movements that have shaped the Basque Country. Covering roll-down metal shutters, a series of murals breathes color into the story of that autonomous community, their fight for sovereignty, their defiance of fascism, and the deep communal bonds of a land nestled between green hills and the Atlantic. A blue panel crowded with faces and their flag stopped me with its inscription:ÌýZuek piztutako suak argitzen du bidea—the fire you kindled lights the path. A reminder, I thought, of our own duty to light it.

Arizmendi 's statue at Mondragon University. Photograph by the author.

It was against that backdrop that many decades ago a young priest, José María Arizmendiarrieta Madariaga, arrived at Arrasate in the wake of the Spanish Civil War. Motivated by Catholic social teaching, he believed even then that "the revolution is called participation," and spread concepts of solidarity among a people left to fend for themselves after a conflict that claimed nearly half a million lives. For Fr. Arizmendi, as he was known, the antidote to unemployment and a broken social fabric was the cooperative experience, which "is consistent with the profound democratic spirit of our own country, and in an effective search for freedom—which the people have seen denied or bargained away many times and in many ways—has sought to pursue and secure this freedom and this wellbeing through the citizens' and workers' own efforts." And so he did more than preach, he built. In the 1950s, he co-founded Ulgor with a group of workers, the first of the Mondragon cooperatives, which would grow into the largest worker-owned enterprise ever conceived.

Over time, Mondragon came to occupy a quasi-mythological place in the cooperative movement—one that entangles history, data, and the folklore people project onto it. As a cooperative scholar and enthusiast, I had always longed to make my own pilgrimage to this Atlantis.Ìý

Serendipity brought me there at last, in the form of an invitation to join the Governance Futures Network convening in Bilbao. The conference room felt like a small world unto itself, packed with academics, practitioners, and funders from Kenya, Nigeria, New Zealand, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, the Basque Country, Belgium, the UK, the US, Canada, and beyond. In our time there, we immersed ourselves in Basque traditions, from the ancient rhythms ofÌýtxalaparta music to site visits that made clear how other possible futures are waiting to unfold through collective governance. At the center of it all, one question: What is the root system we must build and nurture together to create governance futures in service of life?

That question found me before it found the room. I had been asked to introduce it in the opening session, to plant the first seeds, and the responsibility weighed on me in the best possible way. It was fitting, perhaps, that I had just planted my garden for the season before leaving. I spent the days before the convening thinking about what it takes for something small and tender to grow. Part of tending a garden was clearing the weeds that had taken over the plot. There is no space for roots that grip and hoard; we need roots that hold and reach.Ìý

Grounded in my research on cooperative networks, I had come to think of governance as an ecosystem. Each plant in my garden bed told part of the story. A root system is first about identity and integrity, how it serves, nourishes, and stabilizes the organism it belongs to. It is the internal logic of a living system, how water and nutrients rise into leaves, how a tree stands in wind, how a plant becomes itself through what it draws from depth. In governance, roots are what sustain the internal coherence of a community or organization, its values, memory, culture, and nourishment.

Yet no root system ends at the plant. Beyond the individual, the boundary dissolves. Neighbors intertwine and graft their roots. Nutrients travel not just upward but laterally, between organisms, across species, across time, dead roots becoming food for living ones. And then there is mycelium, the threadlike fungi weaving through the earth, extending the root's reach into soil it could never penetrate alone. In governance too, roots are connective tissue between communities and generations, the infrastructure of intercooperation that collective life depends on.

A root system holds these two loyalties simultaneously, to the singular life it sustains, and to the larger web it belongs to. These, perhaps, are the questions for governance: how do we build structures coherent enough to nourish their own people, yet porous enough to serve the web of life beyond themselves? How do we transform an economy of extraction and accumulation into a living network where ownership is distributed, governance is shared, and the health of each node feeds and depends on the health of the whole? Not a market of competing organisms. A forest.

The Basque Country offered me a word for what I had been circling,Ìýauzolan. To receive a word from Basque is to inherit something rare, irreducible. It is the only known language isolate in Europe, unrelated to any other tongue.ÌýAuzolan means collective work, the work of neighbors. A practice whose roots run deeper than any formal governance structure, grounded in solidarity and the quiet understanding that what you give will return to you, and that every act of mutual care strengthens the whole. It names what governance frameworks often struggle to articulate, the spirit of people coming together, sometimes for the common good, sometimes for a single family, always bound by the logic of reciprocity.

·¡³¾²ú±ð»å»å¾±²Ô²µÌýauzolan in governance practices is arguably the most pressing exercise of democratic innovation of our time. In Oñati, Gipuzkoa, the forested hills cradle a laboratory sheltered beside a mountain sanctuary. Arantzazulab is a multidisciplinary space positioned to strengthen the collaborative networks between institutions and the people they serve, deepening the conditions for meaningful public participation. Working alongside Mondragon University and a range of local partners, the lab experiments with and cultivates deliberative democracy from citizens assemblies to business contexts, finding new ways to bring people into the decisions that shape their lives.Ìý

Arantzazulab in Oñati. Photograph by the author.

There, our conversation circle turned to what lies beneath institutional design, to the social contract itself. The deeper work was about rebuilding trust and reactivating the democratic vitality that shapes how people relate to their own governance, rooted in local expectations, values, and culture. The Basque Country knows the cost of getting this wrong. A violent past left deep wounds, and the memory of a polarized, broken society has not faded. What cooperation offered was a way out of the purely transactional, replacing the client and provider relationship with one built on rights, responsibilities, and mutualism, asking not what the community owes you but what you can offer it.

Those paradigms remain alive in the Basque Country, though I had gone to meet the myth and found something better. Its rawness. Countless conversations later, as I prepared to leave, I would pack nothing like a polished fairytale of cooperative commonwealth into my luggage. My souvenir would be a new lens through which to read Mondragon, an unfinished lived reality, with inherent tensions still very much in process.

Mondragon became a symbol of the cooperative movement, and rightly so. Born from radical hope, it spun off new cooperatives as needs and possibilities arose, outgrowing the Basque territory, then Spain, then Europe, spreading from manufacturing plants to banking and university. Yet some argue that something was lost along the way, that democratic grip loosened, that the worker's voice grew quieter, that expansion risked a subtle form of colonialism through subsidiaries overseas that never inherited the cooperative DNA of the mothership. Depending on who you ask, the myth splinters into many versions. As legends tend to do.Ìý

At first, I caught myself wrestling with the flaws and contradictions of Mondragon, measuring it against my own expectations of what a cooperative should be. Then, during a visit to the Faculty of Humanities and Education Sciences at Mondragon University, something shifted. I realized I was holding the cooperative to a scrutiny that few institutions of any kind could survive, let alone the extractive corporations that have shaped our economy, captured our democracies, and hollowed out communities the world over. The more honest work, I came to understand, was to sit with those tensions rather than reach for a verdict. Acknowledging the deficits is the only path toward accountability and renewal. And Mondragon, successful and commendable as it is, was never meant to be a blueprint. The conditions that allowed it to emerge are difficult to replicate, and there is no pattern we can freely import into our own local economies. What we can do is hold space for critique, stay clear-eyed about the limits, and let that clarity kindle what comes next. Because Mondragon's tensions are not just its own. They are the tensions of every cooperative that has grown large enough to forget what it was built for, that has traded democratic depth for operational speed, or expanded beyond the soil that gave it roots. Knowing this is not defeat. It is the condition for lighting theÌýauzolan fire elsewhere.

The Basque way of collective work, in its multidimensionality beyond the Mondragon experience alone, gave me seeds for the garden I am tending back home. Not the one of vegetables and flowers, but the vision of democratic culture and a wellbeing-oriented economy I am helping to build. Less interested in models and well-measured recipes, I am drawn to what collective intelligence and creativity, rooted in radical hope, can sprout. Community empowerment, new forms of meaningful participation and co-creation, collaborative capacity—these are our seedlings. Let them bloom.