Typology of Perspectives About the Commons
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Typology
David Bollier:
"There is no consensus discourse about how to talk about the commons. For now, at least, there is a burgeoning pluriverse of different perspectives, which includes:
- Standard economics, whose commitment to the idea of homo economicus makes the commons appear nonrational and impractical;
- Academic scholarship developed by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues, which generally sees commons as an effective vehicle for collective decisionmaking and management of resources;
- Liberal defenders of public assets who believe the state is the best, most legitimate trustee of public assets;
- Autonomous Marxists who foreground the role of commons in critiquing capitalism and transcending it;
- Subsistence commons that focus on agriculture, forests, fisheries, and care work occurring outside of the market economy and state;
- Practitioner-oriented commons focused on problem-solving and mostly indifferent to the political and philosophical implications of their commoning;
- Open source technology commons that see peer production on digital networks as pathways for social and economic emancipation;
- Voices in the global South who celebrate Indigenous and traditional forms of commoning that challenge the premises of colonialism, capitalism, and modernity.
A key point of consensus among these schools of thought may be that human culture is so multifarious and disparate that the idea of imposing a single, unified global order – a One-World World, which is the ambition of modernity and neoliberal capitalism – is absurd. The world is a pluriverse, as Arturo Escobar puts it (Escobar, 2018).
At the risk of a certain reductionism, it may be helpful to sort these diverse approaches to the commons into three general categories:
- Capitalist-friendly frameworks for seeing commons accept the foundational premises of capitalism, modernity, and liberal democracy. They see the world as largely governed by individual self-interest, market rationality, property rights, and the freedom to contract. Literature on commons in this genre usually define them as resources, with social behaviors playing a secondary role. This framework is most obviously the basis of standard economics and its emphasis on rational, utility-maximizing individual behaviors. Ostrom scholarship has certainly expanded the scope of this standard narrative by documenting the realities of cooperation and calling for experimentation in governance. Ostrom and the “Bloomington School” has also recognized that cooperation is propelled by the complexity of cultural circumstances, social norms, and geography.4 And yet a great deal of commons scholarship nonetheless approaches commons through the lens of methodological individualism and rational-actor, within the framework of the capitalist political economy. Similarly, political liberalism emphasizes the primacy of individual rights and freedoms within a capitalist framework, with the state irregularly acting as a trustee of public assets (public goods as commons). Even many autonomous Marxist interpretations of commons, while still hostile to capitalism, accept these ontological and epistemological premises in their accounts of commons.
- Commons as problem-solving innovation. Practitioners in digital commons and urban commons, among others, are focused on empirical problem-solving in bounded situations. They do not generally care about the philosophical or political ramifications of their commoning. Their overweening focus is how to make collective management of shared resources work. The priority is making software programs, urban partnerships, and other collaborations work in specific, defined situations, without bothering to consider larger conceptual, political, or ideological implications.
- Commons as integrated social organisms. Unlike the other two general approaches, this mindset sees commons as living social organisms defined by the dynamic, unfolding relationships of its members. It is deeply relational and not transactional in nature. Here, commoners self-consciously strive to enact a different social mindset and vision of change. This perspective sees commoning as a way to actualize an ontological shift, or OntoShift, as people struggle to move from a world defined by individualism, calculative rationality, and material self-interest in markets, to one that is richly relational in all directions. The commons, by this reckoning, becomes an inherently subversive discourse and social project because it reframes many basic premises of social, economic, and political life."