Removal with no process
Grounds invented during the case they are used on — and every remaining member quietly learns what the rules really are.
What it looks like
- The agreements state no grounds for removal, or state them without a process.
- A removal is under discussion and the procedure is being written alongside it.
- Nobody can say what the person could have done to avoid it, or could do to return.
- The decision is being made by the people the difficulty is with.
Why it is hard to see
Because by the time it happens, everyone involved is exhausted and certain.
This pattern almost never arrives at the start of a difficulty. It arrives at the end of a long one — after months of the situation not improving, after several attempts that went nowhere, with a group that has run out of patience and a person who has usually stopped engaging. In that state, the absence of a written procedure does not read as a problem. It reads as an obstacle to finally doing something.
So the group acts, and it is often the right outcome reached the wrong way. Which is exactly what makes it hard to see: the decision can be correct and the process still be the failure. Everyone can look at the result, agree it was necessary, and conclude the community handled it.
What was actually learned is learned by everybody else. A community that removed somebody without stated grounds has told every remaining member that membership depends on staying in favour, because that is the only rule anybody observed being applied. Nobody says this out loud. It shows up two years later as a group that has become notably careful with each other, and cannot say when that started.
The second failure is the mirror image and just as common: a community with no process cannot act at all, and so tolerates something genuinely intolerable for years — until the pressure produces the version above. The absence of a procedure does not produce restraint. It produces long paralysis followed by an abrupt decision.
What to check
Ask what the grounds are, before there is a case. If the agreements state none, the community has not decided that removal is impossible. It has decided that removal will be improvised.
Ask what the route back is. A removal or suspension with no stated path to restoration is a permanent outcome, whatever anyone intended. If nobody can describe how somebody regains standing, the answer is that they do not.
Check who would decide. In a small community the people with the authority to remove somebody are usually the people the difficulty is with. That is not corruption; it is arithmetic. It is also the reason an external step matters more here than anywhere else.
If it is already happening
Separate the finding from the decision. What happened, and what should follow, are different questions, and merging them is what makes an improvised removal feel like a verdict from people who had already decided.
Write the procedure for this case, transparently, and say that is what you are doing. It is not ideal and it is honest, and it is much better than acting with nothing while implying a rule existed. Say what the grounds are being taken to be, who is deciding, what the person may respond to, and what happens afterwards.
Get one voice from outside. Not to decide — to observe. A community cannot self-audit a removal in which its own leadership is a party, and an external facilitator is the cheapest available correction.
Then write the general version once it is over, deliberately not about this person, and expect that to take a while. A community that has just done this knows more about what it needs than one that has not.
What prevents it
Stated grounds plus a graduated response — grounds without a process is arbitrary, and a process without grounds means the group cannot act at all. Plus the two things almost always missing: a route back, and somebody involved who is not a party.
Sources & further reading
- 1 RCOS stress test — Expulsion Without Due Process — the specification this page puts into plain language
- 2 RCOS Core — Layer 4: Conflict, Repair & Accountability — due process, proportional sanctions, restoration conditions and elevated safeguards
- 3 Membership: getting in, and getting out — stated grounds plus a graduated response, and what Twin Oaks publishes
Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked. How this is written
The specification
This page is the plain-language version. RCOS publishes the stress test itself — the failure pattern, what is being tested, and what a compliant community would have in place.
RCOS stress test — membership-boundaries/expulsion-without-due-process
Terms used here
- Membership agreement
- The document setting out what a member pays, contributes, may decide, and receives on leaving. The eight things a good one covers are checkable.
- Exit clause
- The written terms on which a member leaves, or the community winds itself up. Agreed while everyone is still calm, which is the only time it can be.
- Graduated sanctions
- Responding to a first breach differently from a fifth. One of Ostrom's design principles, and the answer to a rule with no stated consequence.
- Repair process
- The agreed route a conflict takes. The test is not which method a community uses but whether someone who is not in charge can start it.
These travel together
Failures are rarely alone. If this one is familiar, check the others from the same lesson before concluding you have found the whole problem.
- The norm nobody could enforce
A commitment written into the founding vision, and no process behind it — so the first person to break it discovers there was nothing there.
- Rules that spread into private life
Each new rule was a reasonable answer to a real problem, and together they have opinions about your visitors, your diet and your evenings.
- The purpose that quietly changed
Nobody voted to become something else — enough people arrived wanting something else that it happened anyway.