research

Last week, the International Journal of the Commons published a special issue inspired by the ideas of my 2019 book Free, Fair and Alive, written with my late friend and colleague Silke Helfrich. I am thrilled and honored. The collection of eight essays revolves around the theme, “Advancing the Commonsverse: The Political Economy of the Commons." In varied theaters of action, it deals with many issues that Free, Fair and Alive focused on, especially the relationality that drives commoning and the tensions between commons and state power. 

There are thoughtful pieces on public/commons partnerships in Barcelona, and in Naples and Bologna…. on "the incompatibility of the commons and the public".... on commons as "relational ecosystems"…. on the need for new ways of studying commons through "comparison and interpretation," to improve our practical knowledge of how commons work….and a feminist look at the "micro-politics" of commoning and municipalist movements in Spain. (A full list of authors, their essays, and weblinks is below.)

My concluding essay, "Challenges in Expanding the Commonsverse," reflects on a broad range of contemporary commons movements, the “ontological politics” they are engendering, and the challenges in expanding and institutionalizing commoning today. I pay special attention to the potential of commons/public partnerships, new infrastructures to make commoning easier, legal hacks to open up zones of commoning, the potential of relationalized finance, and new institutional structures of care.

The general public may not give much thought to how scientists and scholars publish their work, but please know that it matters. Like so much else in the world, corporate markets have colonized this space, which means that turning business profits is the primary goal, not the easy, affordable sharing of knowledge.

Commercial academic publishers have long privatized and monetized academic research, which over time has resulted in an oligopoly of a few publishers able to charge exorbitant prices for their books and journal subscriptions. The impact has been greatest on researchers in the Global South and at smaller, less affluent colleges and universities, where it is harder to access and share the latest scientific and scholarly research.

The most spirited response has come from the open access publishing movement. Open access, or OA, got its start twenty years ago as a way to publish academic books, journals, and other research that can be readily shared and copied. This was a break from the traditional publishing models that allowed major corporations to take researchers' copyrights and convert the fruits of academic commons into expensive proprietary products.

OA publications offered a refreshing alternative for making works permanently shareable at no or minimal cost. An example is open textbooks. They can rely on Creative Commons licenses to make the works legally shareable; print them using print-on-demand technology; and sell them at the cost of printing.

Open access not only helps scientists, scholars, and students build on the work of those who came before them. It assures a basic fairness -- to the academic fields that generated the knowledge in the first place, and to taxpayers who often pay (via the government) for research in science, medicine, and the humanities. Why should corporate publishers get to own the copyrights and privatize the gains of publicly funded research and public universities?

To explore the state of open access publishing today, I spoke recently with Sam Moore, an organizer with the Radical Open Access Collective on my Frontiers of Commoning podcast (episode #25). Moore is also a scholarly communications specialist at Cambridge University Library in England, and a research associate at Homerton College.

My interview digs into the oligopoly control of academic publishing, the high prices of academic journals and books, the lack of choices among many scientists and scholars, the limited leadership of university administrations, and some open-access innovations now being developed.

We’ve entered World Commons Week, a second annual celebration/research fest organized by the International Association for the Study of the Commons! “The overarching idea,” explains the IASC, is “to celebrate and draw attention to commons research an practice and devote a week toward promoting local-to-global events.” Events began on Sunday, October 6, and will continue through Friday, October 12.

Local events range from teach-ins and local talks to community practitioner meetings and organizing events for commons. A map on the World Commons Week website lists three dozen or more events around the world. They include a showing of a documentary film on common land at the University of Aveiro, in Portugal; a webinar on peer production and commons by Michael Bauwens at Copenhagen University; and a webinar conference on open data mapping in Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

For my part, I will be speaking at an all-campus makerspace at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on Friday, October 11, about my new book with Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive. (Details in righthand column.)

Every day of Commons Week will also feature a “keynote webinar” by a commons scholar from diverse locations around the world. You can check out the list of webinar talks here.

A big salute to IASC for helping to bring more public prominence to commons scholarship and practice!

I always find it refreshing when people decide to investigate the commons from new angles and in transdisciplinary ways.  So it is a treat to learn about the web journal Lo Squaderno devoting its entire December 2013 issue (#30) to “Commons – Practices, Boundaries and Thresholds.”  The entire issue is available as a pdf file under a Creative Commons BY-ND-SA license.  

Lo Squaderno is “a free web journal devoted to exploring and advancing research movements…. [that] collects original short features by people committed to research in various fields.  Each issue is structured around a thematic focus around the topics of space, power, and society.”  This commons issue, edited by Giacomo DAlisa and Cristina Mattiuci, along with guest artist Andrea Sarti, consists of nine essays in English and three in Italian.   

Below, provocative excerpts from three of the essays.  In “Show Me the Action, and I Will Show You the Commons!” Helene Finiori, building on Silke Helfrich's observations, points out that the conventional ways of identifying common goods, based on their “rivalry” and “excludability,” is unreliable: 

Types of goods are traditionally distinguished based on their degree of rivalry (the extent to which the use of a good by one diminishes the availability for others) and excludability (the extent to which access to a good can be denied or limited). This perspective ignores for a large part the contextual and variable nature of goods in time and under the ‘stress’ of repeated activity. It does not take into account the fact that rivalry can be a matter of perception (a good may be categorized non rival because perceived as abundantly available irrespective of whether self-renewable or not, such as water in ‘wet’ places), of congestion (a good may be non rival up to a point of saturation, such as roads before they get jammed) or of yield point (a good may be non rival up to the limit beyond which there is no more resilience under stress and therefore no more self-regeneration, such as a savannah before desertification).  It does not acknowledge that low rivalry goods can also be depleted and made unavailable as a result of toxic outputs of activity (externalities). Neither does it consider the fact that property and access, in other words excludability, create artificial boundaries that businesses for example are constantly seeking to expand by inventing new property rights or business models, as part of their ‘natural’ quest to extend the perimeter in which they can generate and capture value. The examples of patented seeds and attempts to patent the human genome are the most striking.

I’ve always been disappointed that the rich diversity of commons projects and scholarship that is exploding internationally cannot be readily seen – and what does exist tends to be written by and for academics. The International Commons Conference in Berlin in November 2010 brought this issue home by showing the amazing breadth of commons activism and thinking out there. The question is, How can someone tap into this knowledge? 

My friend and colleague Silke Helfrich and I have tried to remedy this problem by assembling a big anthology of essays on the commons by leading activists, scholars and project leaders.  I am happy to report that the German version of this book, edited by Helfrich and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, has just been published.  It’s called Commons:  For a Policy Beyond Market and State, and it's available from the German publisher, transcript. 

The 526-page book is likely to be a sourcebook on the commons for quite some time.  At least I hope so.  It contains 73 essays by authors who live in 30 countries around the world.  The essays focus on everything from commons-based abundance and free software to land enclosures and P2P urbanism.  There are essays by Peter Linebaugh on the history of the commons, Silvia Federici on women and the commons, Rob Hopkins on resilience, Liz Alden Wily on the international land grabs, Massimo de Angelis on capitalism and cooperation, and Hervé Le Crosnier on modern forms of enclosure, among many others. 

The point is to highlight the remarkable international diversity of commons projects, activism and theoretical thought.  The book features a number of essays by academics working in the Ostrom school of commons scholarship, but also many scholars from other traditions and independent activists. A major challenge was translating many essays from English and Spanish into German, and editing them all into a standard format.  A hearty congratulations to Silke and the Böll Foundationfor tackling this formidable task over the past year!