Adaptive resilience in community-owned digital infrastructure: reconstituting material-governance alignment under cumulative infrastructural commitments

Abstract

Community-owned digital infrastructures must adapt without a focal organization capable of directing system-wide change. Adaptation becomes more difficult as infrastructure development creates investments, rights, obligations, and service dependencies that cannot readily be undone. We examine how adaptive resilience is accomplished under these conditions through an abductive longitudinal study of Guifi, a community-owned telecommunications infrastructure. Drawing on assemblage theory, we develop a process model comprising four organizing configurations: Anchoring, Opening, Rupture, and Renewal. The model shows how initially workable alignment between material infrastructure and governance comes under strain as new technologies, actors, and investments enter. When governance fails to keep pace with these changes, control and dependency become unevenly embedded in the installed base, creating misalignment and a credible risk of fragmentation. This risk can prompt actors to renegotiate rights, responsibilities, and governance arrangements around the infrastructure on which they continue to depend. We conceptualize adaptive resilience as the relational accomplishment of reconstituting workable material-governance alignment while sustaining continued operation. We also introduce cumulative infrastructural commitments to explain why infrastructural development makes reconfiguration increasingly consequential and only partially reversible. The study extends assemblage theory by showing that relations may remain contingent and detachable while their reconfiguration becomes unevenly feasible, costly, and collectively consequential. • Introduces a processual model of adaptive resilience in digital commons. • Conceptualizes adaptive resilience as emergent from organizing processes, not static capability. • Identifies four patterns—Anchoring, Opening, Rupture, Renewal—that structure adaptive resilience. • Applies assemblage theory to explain socio-technical reconfiguration over time. • Offers actionable insights for designing governance mechanisms for sustainability.