In recent years, common ownership has enjoyed unprecedented favour
among policy-makers and citizens in the United States, Canada, and
Europe. Conservation land trusts, affordable-housing co-operatives,
community gardens, and neighbourhood-managed parks are spreading
throughout major cities. Normatively, these common-ownership regimes
are seen as yielding a variety of benefits, such as a communitarian
ethos in the efficient use of scarce resources, or greater freedom to
interact and create in new ways. The design of common-ownership
regimes, however, requires difficult trade-offs. Most importantly,
successful achievement of the goals of common-ownership regimes
requires the limitation of individual co-owners’ ability to
freely use the common resource, as well as to exit the common-ownership
arrangement.
This article makes two contributions. First, at the normative level, it
argues that common ownership has the potential to help foster greater
“equality of autonomy”. By “equality of
autonomy”, I mean more equitable access to the material and
relational means that allow individuals to be autonomous. Second, at
the level of design, this article argues that the difficult trade-offs
of common-ownership regimes should be dealt with by grounding the
commitment to equality of autonomy in the context of specific
resources. In some cases, this resource-specific design helps to
minimize or avoid difficult trade-offs. In hard cases, where trade-offs
cannot be avoided, this article offers arguments for privileging
greater equality of autonomy over full negative freedom.