Raisa Galea: ‘Commons’ is a word on many lips, yet not everyone has a clear understanding of the concept. What is commons?
Massimo De Angelis: Commons is about sharing resources, collaborating and making decisions together without a top-down dictate. There is a variety of definitions which delve into what and how should be shared.
Elinor Ostrom, the Nobel Prize laureate awarded the prize precisely for her extensive work on the commons, defined it as common-pool finite resources such as grazing grounds, forests, coastal areas, rivers and so on. She argued that the best way to manage these natural ecosystems would be through a collective action of the people who use these resources, and not through state or market mechanisms. Unfortunately, today these common-pool resources are increasingly threatened by economic development that benefits only the few.
One of the limitations of Ostrom’s work is that, to her, only these types of resources could be defined as commons. However, there are plenty of examples demonstrating that people can collectively manage all sorts of things, not just the natural resources. At the People’s Library set up by the Occupy movement in New York, books—what Ostrom would call resources units—are also organised as commons. In principle, everything—natural and man-made resources and services—can be communalised, meaning they can be shared and governed by the community that handles them.
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