Emerging Commons
| Published date | 01 September 2008 |
| Date | 01 September 2008 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0964663908093965 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
EMERGING COMMONS
JANE B. HOLDER AND TATIANA FLESSAS
University College London, UK, and London School of Economics, UK
ABSTRACT
This special issue explores the idea of commons, placing it in a theoretical but also
richly empirical context. In this introductory article, we highlight the depth and
diversity of the scholarship on commons represented in this issue. Drawing from the
articles that follow, we examine a range of commons that share a dependency upon
the collective and local ownership of land, resources or ideas, held in an often
communal manner and sometimes in opposition to private property. We begin by
returning to land as the original locus of commons and trace the importance of issues
of public space and public access. In moving beyond a land-based and unitary concep-
tion of commons, we analyse the emergence of richer understandings of commons,
divorced from physical or geographical entities – cultural and historical commons,
and environmental commons including the idea of a ‘Global Commons’. In these
different settings, we consider how the idea of ‘the commons’ can work as a signifier
– of resistance, community, collective action and common values.
KEY WORDS
collective commons; common values; commons as resistance; commons as signifiers;
commons scholarship; cultural/historical commons; forms of enclosure; new forms
of commons
THE IDEA of ‘the commons’ is emerging as a powerful tool for political,
legal and social action on the part of existing and would-be extant
communities. Divorced from many traditional models of ‘ownership’,
the mechanisms that create the commons express shared investments in, and
use of, emerging resources: ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are being re-imagined and
parcelled out in ways that, in each specific case study in this collection,
combine to form innovative templates for considerations of identity, commu-
nality and sociality in the modern world. The subject-position of the ‘owner’,
although remaining privileged in law and society, is being appropriated by
flexible groupings of actors that would not formerly have been understood
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore, www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 17(3), 299–310
DOI: 10.1177/0964663908093965
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