Commons

Summary

Commons have become an increasingly topical issue, which concerns the access, use, and management of both material and immaterial goods. Three major strands of literature have developed since the publication, in 1968, of Garrett Hardin’s seminal article on the “Tragedy of the Commons”: an institutional economics, a historical-legal, and a Marxist political economy approach. The former, where Elinor Ostrom features prominently, analyzes how resources can be effectively managed through institutional arrangements other than public ownership or privatization and that match the features of the resources and the users. The second builds on the decline of the commons with the rise of capitalism and the structuring of the modern state to argue for the protection or revival of the commons, while also valorizing non-Western conceptions of the biophysical realm and its relationship to human collectives. The third focuses particularly on the forms and objects of appropriation that emerge with post-Fordist, “cognitive” capitalism and neoliberal governance, and it applies a broader palette of terms, such as common (in the singular) and commoning, to make the case for how the attack on and the promotion of the commons are fraught with major political implications. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses and responds to different framings of the historical conjuncture: either the “limits to growth” or the “growth of limits.” The characteristics of a form of capital accumulation that began to develop in the 1990s, captured by the idea of the “internalization of limits,” are mostly neglected. New materialist, eco-Marxist, and feminist strands of thought converge with a key aspect of Ostrom’s contribution in providing grounds for addressing this challenge.