On the commons of developed industrialized countries

Abstract

The editorial discusses the status and prospects of the commons of developed industrialized countries, based on the literature. For the traditional commons, one key variable for long-term development prospects of the commons is found in the way ownership to the commons is structured. A second key variable is the way increasing knowledge, including scientific environmental knowledge, has affected our perception of what a resource is within a commons and its value. The way these two variables characterizing commons: "structure of ownership" and "knowledge of valuable resources" are related is illustrated in a process referred to as "the withering away" with potential for widely diverging outcomes. Also new emerging urban commons are commented on and a more indepth study of both traditional and new urban commons is called for.

‘The tragedy of the commons’ by underuse: toward a conceptual framework based on ecosystem services and satoyama perspective

“…Demographic Drivers: Traditional commons are mainly found in rural areas, and they have been exploited by the rural population for survival in an economy dominated by agriculture; however, this pattern has changed given the currently "low proportion of population in rural areas" (Berge and McKean 2015). Particularly in Japanese satoyama, severe depopulation and aging are increasing.…”

“…Although some works in commons research have mentioned or discussed the underuse problem (e.g. Berge and McKean 2015;Shimada 2015), there still seems room for investigating it in a broader context.…”

Diversity and Challenges of the Urban Commons: A Comprehensive Review

“…Those are generally public services under the responsibility of the welfare state (Susser & Tonnelat, 2013;Foster & Iaione, 2016). As for the Market Commons, there are only few cases of locally made goods being sold, exchanged or gifted: shopping centres (Berge & McKean, 2015), Smart City initiatives (Leitheiser & Follmann, 2019;Teli et al, 2015), free space or products Figure 2 Weight of each research field in our urban commons corpus, expressed as a percentage of all articles and books, either in Scopus (left) or WebOfScience (right) database. (Arora, 2015;Susser, 2017a;Susser & Tonnelat, 2013).…”

“…The socio-economic context is usually a strong motivation for commoning [40], such as economic crises (Di Feliciantonio, 2017a;Huron, 2015), housing crises (Aernouts & Ryckewaert, 2017;Bunce, 2016) or the welfare state drawback (e.g., Camps-Calvet et al, 2015). In the case of economic depression, urban disinvestment, decay and fiscal cuts can happen, eventually leading to insufficiently maintained public parks and a weak provision of social goods: this is the welfare state drawback (Berge & McKean, 2015;Camps-Calvet et al, 2015). This phenomenon fuels the urban commons, as a replacement either bottom-up, such as in Cape Town (Colding et al, 2013), or through local politicians' initiatives, such as in Berlin after the collapse of the Berlin Wall (Colding & Barthel, 2013).…”

Building a Knowledge Commons: Evidence from the Participatory Guarantee System for an Agroecology Label in Morocco

“…One major difference stems from the fact that intellectual resources are not physically subtractable (non-rival). Therefore, new commons frequently refer to organizations designed to care for public goods or large-scale club goods (Berge & Mckean, 2015). Nevertheless, these resources are threatened by depreciation in terms of the quality of the information (linked to error and embezzlement), the risk of non-renewal (their non-adaptation to uses) or by privatization (individuals wrongfully excluded from using the CPR) (Boyle, 2003;Hess & Ostrom, 2007).…”