The Minga

A minga is a collective work practice in which community members come together to accomplish a shared task — building a house, clearing a road, maintaining shared infrastructure, planting a communal field. The minga is organized not by market incentives or hierarchical authority but by communal obligation and the ethic of reciprocity. Each participant contributes according to capacity, and the community benefits collectively from the result. The minga is simultaneously practical and political: it accomplishes material work while enacting and reinforcing the communal bonds that sustain the community's capacity for collective action. Escobar proposes it as the metaphor adequate to a technological transition whose challenges exceed individual response.