Legal Innovations in Beating the Bounds: Part II of Law for the Commons
Below, a continuation of yesterday's post from the strategy memo, "Reinventing Law for the Commons," Part II of the four-part piece.
II. Legal Innovations in Beating the Bounds: Nine Promising Fields of Action
Part II surveys the enormous amount of legal innovation going on in various commons-related fields of action. The point of this section is to identify specific initiatives that are trying to transform the legal paradigm or carve out new “protected zones” of enforceable rights within existing legal frameworks. I have identified nine major “clusters” of interesting experimentation and ferment:
1. Indigenous Commons
2. Subsistence Commons in the Global South
3. Digital Commons
4. Stakeholder Trusts
5. Co-operative Law
6. Urban Commons
7. Localism
8. New Organizational Forms
9. Re-imagining State Policy to Empower Commons
Today's post focuses on the first four "clusters"; tomorrow's deals with #5 through #9. And the final day will deal with Part III: The Strategic Value of Developing Law for the Commons, and Part IV: Next Steps.
The list of clusters and examples in Part II is not comprehensive. It is merely a first attempt to assemble the fragments of commons-based legal innovation into a new mosaic that makes key, unifying themes more visible. (I invite readers of this memo to inform me of any worthy additions by contacting me at david/at/bollier.org.) Some examples may belong in two or more clusters, which I’ve tried to indicate with cross-references. In Part III, I will reflect on the political and philosophical implications of the examples of Part II, followed by a discussion in Part IV of practical steps that might be taken to consolidate and extend Law for the Commons as a coherent body of legal activism.
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