Sovereign Accountable Commons

The Sovereign Accountable Commons

Culture-Hacking, Alt.Education, Targeted Currency Design, NextNet Technologies.

Think Like a Commoner | A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons

In our age of predatory markets and make-believe democracy, our troubled political institutions have lost sight of real people and practical realities. But if you look to the edges, ordinary people are reinventing governance and provisioning on their own terms. The commons is arising as a serious, practical alternative to the corrupt Market/State.

The tragedy of the commons is a false and dangerous myth | Aeon Essays

Far from being profoundly destructive, we humans have deep capacities for sharing resources with generosity and foresight

Funding the Commons | Public Goods Funding

We convene researchers, builders, and institutions to develop the funding mechanisms, governance systems, and coordination tools that public goods need in an age of AI.

New to the Commons? | David Bollier

If you’re coming to the commons for the first time, it can be difficult to grok the idea because there are so many different ways to understand the commons.  That’s because the commons is not so much a fixed, universal thing as a general concept describing durable, dynamic sets of social relationships for managing resources -- all sorts of resources:  digital, urban, natural, indigenous, rural, cultural, scientific, to use some crude categories.

The Commons, Short and Sweet | David Bollier

I am always trying to figure out how to explain the idea of the commons to newcomers who find it hard to grasp.  In preparation for a talk that I gave at the Caux Forum for Human Security, near Montreux, Switzerland, I came up with a fairly short overview, which I have copied below.  I think it gets to the nub of things.

Elinor Ostrom’s 8 rules for managing the commons

The commons are those things that we all own together, that are neither privately owned, nor managed by the government on our behalf. Some are large scale and somewhat abstract, such as the English…

Unlocking the commons

"The most powerful and interesting media model will remain raising money from members who don't just permit but <em>insist</em> that the product be given away for free."

Reclaiming the Computing Commons

Hunter writes: The commodification and exploitation of nature; the enclosure of the intellectual and informational commons in medicine, agriculture, and other areas of technical knowledge; the expropriation of public space to secure profit-all define an economic system supposedly premised on freedom.

Price and Sovereignty Harvard Law Review

[W]e must not overlook the actual fact that dominion over things is also imperium over our fellow human beings. — Professor Morris R. Cohen,...

The Indian street dog crisis and multispecies coexistence in tropical urban futures

Cities in the Global South struggle with human–animal coexistence conundrums. For example, in South Asia, old and new collide: people raise livestock informally and feed free-ranging animals within heterogeneously developed, juxtaposed patches, while digital economies boom amid threats from waste piles linked with zoonotic diseases and conflicts. This is exemplified by the free-ranging dog crises in India. Humanity’s oldest companion now suffers between compassion and rising conflicts. Dogs still scavenge, guard, breed, disperse and die on streets shaped by traffic, garbage, ritual feeding and uneven care. Indian courts, attempting to address the problems, have overlooked the root cause—food subsidies. Sterilization, shelters, fencing or removals cannot succeed when urban landscapes provide food subsidies to animals without corresponding responsibility. Episodes of reactive management must yield to urban planning, acknowledging that multispecies communities in shared living spaces are complex and interconnected. Here, I suggest making compassion accountable to public health, animal well-being and urban ecology.

A Revised “Ostrom’s Design Principles for Collective Governance of the Commons

A Revised “Ostrom’s Design Principles for Collective Governance of the Commons” The traditional economic definition of “the commons” are those resources...

Commons

The commons are the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values employed for a governance mechanism. Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.

Democracy and the Epistemic Commons - The Consilience Project

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Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market has been uniformly successful in solving common-pool resource problems. After critiquing the foundations of pol icy analysis as applied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom here provides a unique body of empirical data to explore the conditions under which common-pool resource problems have been satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily solved.  Dr. Ostrom first describes three models most frequently used as the foundation for recommending state or market solutions. She then outlines theoretical and empirical alternatives to these models in order to illustrate the diversity of possible solutions. In the following chapters she uses institutional analysis to examine different ways - both successful and unsuccessful - of governing the commons. In contrast to the propositions of the " tragedy of the commons" argument. common-pool problems sometimes are solved by voluntary organizations rather than by a coercive state. Among the cases considered are communal tenure in meadows and forest, irrigation communities and other water rights. and fisheries. Governing the Commons makes a major contribution to the analytical literature on institutions and to our understanding of human cooperation.  Elinor Ostrom is co-director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis and professor of political science at Indiana University.