Commons Organizing: Embedding Common Good and Institutions for Collective Action. Insights from Ethics and Economics

In recent years, business ethics and economic scholars have been paying greater attention to the development of commons organizing. The latter refers to the processes by which communities of people work in common in the pursuit of the common good. In turn, this promotes commons organizational designs based on collective forms of common goods production, distribution, management and ownership. In this paper, we build on two main literature streams: (1) the ethical approach based on the theory of the common good of the firm in virtue ethics and (2) the economic approach based on the theory of institutions for collective action developed by Ostrom’s research on common-pool resources to avert the tragedy of the commons. The latter expands to include the novel concepts of new commons, “commoning” and polycentric governance. Drawing on the analysis of what is new in these forms of organizing, we propose a comprehensive model, highlighting the integration of two sets of organizing principles—common good and collective action – and five problem-solving processes to explain the main dimensions of commons organizing. We contribute to business ethics literature by exploring the convergence between the ethical and economic approaches in the development of a commons organizing view.

Towards new commons and sharing interests in the landscape, integrating natural and cultural heritage

Heritage values represent a common good, contributing to societal identity. Landscape is a topical issue because it represents character and identity in both a spatial and a temporal dimension, uniting natural and cultural aspects of heritage at the same time. Especially in Europe, practically all natural heritage can be considered cultural heritage as well, since it is through human action that Europe’s biodiversity has evolved. Heritage perspectives on landscape and nature underline time depth, human agency and social value within landscape. Its cultural starting point does not marginalise nature, but places nature within cultural filters, thus highlighting the reciprocity of nature and culture in the creation of sustainable places. Today’s changing society is transitioning towards new forms of governance dominated by collaboration and continuously shifting networks or actors. Reported examples of cultural landscapes explore heritage management approaches that benefit from combining natural and cultural heritage perceptions. In this context, commonly accessible heritage can bring people together in joint efforts to use the inherited landscape as a shared and cherished resource rather than a conserved and regulated landscape.

Afterword

If the ‘Paineite’ approach associates the rights of man with popular sovereignty, together with social welfare and decent wages, the ‘Spencean’ approach insists that political revolution needs to be accompanied by social revolution, and remedial measures by efforts to seek out and transform the roots of injustice. It is, of course, the former that has been most important in shaping the course of history (including the history of human rights), and that is most familiar today. This Afterword gives brief consideration to the question of what it might mean to recover the Spencean alternative in a world of ‘new enclosures’ and ‘new commons’.