Скачать или смотреть The Political Economy of the Commons, Hendrik Wagenaar, 6 December 2022

The Political Economy of the Commons

In the last decade over 500 commons producing renewable energy have emerged in the Netherlands. A similar number provide social care. The municipalism upheaval in Barcelona and other cities was driven by childcare commons. In many European countries commons have become a regular feature of the social landscape. All of these are bottom-up initiatives of ordinary people. Since Elinor Ostrom’s seminal book, commons have also been the subject of a rapidly expanding literature. Ostrom’s claim was that the commons showed there existed an alternative economic rationality that was not based on individual utility maximization, but on collaboration.

Contemporary commons are based on two more ambitious moral claims. The first is that commons are a form of social-economic provisioning that is functionally, democratically and morally superior to that provided by market capitalism. The second is that commons are a viable and robust alternative to the current neoliberal political economy. Ostrom conceptualised commons as free-standing local entities, ignoring their long historical and political legacy. In this presentation I will go beyond Ostrom. I will first define commons in a more comprehensive manner. I will then situate them in the contemporary political economy and sketch the many hurdles that prevent commons from escaping their local ghetto. I draw on the work of the commons scholars and activists David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, in particular their recent book Free, Fair and Alive (2019), which I consider one of the most important political theory books of the last decade.

About the speaker

Hendrik Wagenaar is internationally renowned for his research on participatory democracy and local governance, practice theory and interpretive policy analysis, including projects on urban governance, prostitution policy, social welfare, policy implementation and the (unintended) consequences of public policy making. He is an Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance.