A pharmaceutical commons? Producing alterity through public-common partnerships

This paper contributes theorisations of alterity within alternative organisation studies by arguing ‘alterity’ must be understood as a second-order characteristic rather than a quality intrinsic to organisational form. It develops this argument by engaging with recent scholarship focused on the potential for public bodies, especially municipal authorities, to act as enablers of commoning initiatives across various sectors. Public-common partnerships (PCPs) have been variously theorised as a mechanism for the radical decentralisation and democratisation of hitherto publicly owned and governed assets, contributing to a wider counter-hegemonic dynamic. Whilst existing research has tended to focus on the promotion of democratic agency and autonomy as distinguishing features, this is a necessary yet insufficient understanding of PCPs, leaving them open to the accusation of being ‘Janus-faced’ innovations in ‘governance beyond the state’. Drawing on a process of real utopian sociological research in Lyon, this paper addresses this shortcoming through considering the prospects for developing PCPs in the pharmaceutical sector. The paper concludes that alterity ought to be defined by the transitional dynamics that an organisation can produce within and beyond itself, rather than by its intrinsic characteristics.