Creating a community owned place that serves the greater local community of the Osa.

What vision, opportunity, or community need inspired your action?

The vision behind the Recommoning project is to transition Los Higuerones from private ownership into a community-stewarded commons. Costa Rica's famous traditional conservation, gentrification, and privatization are starting to define the Osa Peninsula more and more, reducing local access to land, eroding traditional practices, and weakening community cohesion. By moving Los Higuerones into shared ownership, we are creating a long-term sanctuary for cultural, ecological, and community-led projects that strengthen the local food system, economy, and land-based knowledge.

What took place during the action?

Over the last five years, Los Higuerones has grown into a community-led hub of 50+ local people, supported by 200+ visitors and digital stewards. To activate the Recommoning, we:

1. Hosted brainstorming sessions and meetings to design a membership model that encourages reciprocity with the space.
2. Carried out extensive administrative work to formalize the membership model and prepare for outreach.
3. Researched opportunities for land tokenization and technologies that enable decentralized, community-based organizing and governance.
4. Advanced investment readiness through legal research, development of an infodeck, and outreach to aligned funders.

What truths or insights did this action reveal?

We learned that emergent strategy—creating space for exploration and letting clarity arrive at the right time—is essential in complex, community-driven projects. Despite challenges with participation and navigating decentralized governance tools, the process revealed that ownership can be nurtured through both technology and commitment. A breakthrough insight was the development of a hybrid model: combining tokenized shares with a community “commitment pool” for decision-making.

Gift to Community: What enduring tool, method, or story emerged that others can benefit from?The enduring gift is both practical and philosophical:

1. A replicable process for transitioning private land into a commons through membership models, legal preparation, and decentralized governance exploration.
2. The use of emergent strategy as a guiding principle shows that patient exploration can lead to innovative solutions that serve all of life at the right moment.
3. A story of how communities can balance technology with human commitment to create shared stewardship of land.

Next Steps / Call to Action: What comes next for this project? How can your community or Bloom network support you?

Our immediate next step is to finalize the comprehensive outline of the commons model—including the technologies we envision—and share it with funders and partners to attract funding. To strengthen local ownership, we are refining the membership system and onboarding process, encouraging both financial and in-kind contributions, and weaving this with regular work parties that keep the space alive.