Dossier « Le champ descommonsen question : perspectives croisées » - From common pastures to global commons: a historical perspective on interdisciplinary approaches to commons

Abstract

N a t u r e s Sciences Sociétés Dossier Regards Keywords:commons; history; interdisciplinarity; long-term development; institutions Abstract -Over the past decades the scope of commons research has been expanded considerably, and scholars from various disciplines working on the subject have moved closer to a common definition. There is however still one essential and quite fundamental point of disagreement (although it is hardly ever made explicit) and that is about the use of the term "commons", which is a centuries-old term. Historically, when used with the definite article, it has denoted a community's common pasturage. More recently, the term is also being used by scholars from other disciplines to include completely open resources such as oceans and the air we breathe, which are also referred to as "global commons". Although it cannot be denied that the air and seas are in principle collective resources available to all creatures on Earth, these resources lack two important attributes that are characteristic of the commons as they have existed for centuries in Europe and beyond. Unlike the global commons, the historical commons were characterized by institutionalization and self-governance. In this article we describe the evolution of the term and the discipline over the past few centuries and suggest ways to reconcile these differences. Reconciling them could improve integration of the long-term historical approach in the analysis of present-day interpretations, which in itself would be an important step forward in commons research. Mots-clés :biens communs ; histoire ; interdisciplinarité ; développement à long-terme ; institutions Résumé -Des pâtures communales aux biens communs mondiaux : un regard historique sur les approches interdisciplinaires des biens communs. Au cours des dernières décennies, le champ de la recherche sur les biens communaux ou biens communs (commons) s'est considérablement élargi et les chercheurs des diverses disciplines qui étudient cet objet tendent peu à peu vers une définition commune. Il reste cependant un point de désaccord majeur et tout à fait fondamental, quoique rarement explicité : l'emploi du terme « biens communaux », expression qui remonte loin dans l'Histoire. Historiquement, en anglais, quand il est accompagné de l'article défini (the commons), il désignait les communaux, c'est-à-dire les pâtures ou parcours communaux d'une collectivité. Plus récemment, les chercheurs d'autres disciplines ont utilisé ce terme pour caractériser des ressources d'accès totalement libre telles que les océans et l'air que nous respirons, désignées sous le nom de « biens communs mondiaux ». Même si l'air et les mers sont indéniablement des ressources collectives accessibles en principe à tout habitant de la planète, il manque à ces ressources deux attributs importants qui sont caractéristiques des « communaux » tels qu'ils ont existé pendant des siècles en Europe et au-delà. Contrairement aux biens communs mondiaux, les biens communs historiques étaient caractérisés par une institutionn...

Understanding Cooperative Finance as a New Common

“…At that time, pressure was being placed on the land through competing practices stemming from population growth. Part of the land was established as ‘commons’, being jointly managed by communities (De Moor ). Over time, the term has been extended to designate other natural common‐pool resources.…”

“…Authors highlight the evolutionary dimension of the attributes of goods that can change with technology, growing scarcity, or even institutional design (Harribey ). Public goods, for example, can become common‐pool resources when they are depleting, such as air or food (De Moor ; Vivero Pol ). New technologies can alter the cost of exclusion of goods.…”

Did the Commons Make Medieval and Early Modern Rural Societies More Equitable? A Survey of Evidence from across Western Europe, 1300–1800

“…Although the ‘commons’ are now being used in a wider sense to refer to many different types of institution for collective action, both past and present (De Moor , fn. 3; ), the more traditional and restricted definition refers to two resource‐management systems (with multifarious nuances and differing versions) found in the pre‐industrial Western European countryside, and which experienced formalized institutional crystallization roughly around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (with undoubtedly much earlier informal antecedents) . The common fields were essentially private cultivated arable lands farmed collectively.…”

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“…The term 'commons' can refer to a resource, those who are entitled to use the resource, or to the governance arrangements designed to manage it (De Moor 2011). Much of the work on commons in the social sciences remains indebted to Elinor Ostrom and her team who, following a new institutionalist framework, described self-governing, bottom-up arrangements with well-defined access rules to manage resource systems.…”