Global Commons Revisited
| Published date | 01 February 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-5899.2011.00156.x |
| Date | 01 February 2012 |
| Author | John Vogler |
Global Commons Revisited
John Vogler
Keele University, UK
Abstract
Global commons are areas and resources defined as being beyond sovereign jurisdiction. They are socially constructed
and this article identifies four: the high seas and deep seabed, Antarctica, outer space and the global atmosphere
although attempts to designate new areas as commons are also noted. The construction of global commons, it is
argued, has been determined by shifts in human knowledge, capability and perceptions of scarcity. The commons
problem, as defined by Hardin and other analysts arises from the ecological consequences of open access, but also
from the renewed concerns of strategists about the military use of common spaces. In the international system a
primary response has been to extend sovereignty and the degree to which the global commons have been enclosed
is assessed. An alternative model is provided by the negotiation of common heritage status, but since the experiment
with the deep sea bed this has not found favour in the Arctic, Antarctic and elsewhere. In terms of the continuing
management of the commons the international community has resorted to an array of regulatory regimes of varying
coverage and effectiveness
The idea of global commons is of relatively recent origin,
although some of the phenomena to which it refers are
very ancient. Since the early 1980s, in discussions of glo-
bal environmental issues, the term was in common par-
lance. While it did not appear in the documentation for
the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment,
economists debated the global commons a decade later
(e.g. Nordhaus, 1982). The influential Brundtland Com-
mission Report, that set the stage for the 1992 Earth
Summit, devoted an entire chapter to the subject (World
Commission on Environment and Development, 1987).
For the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD), the global commons are ‘…natural
assets, outside national jurisdiction such as the oceans,
outer space and the Antarctic’, and from the Oxford Eng-
lish Dictionary, ‘Any of the earth’s ubiquitous and
un-owned natural resources such as the oceans, the
atmosphere and space’. Discussions of the global com-
mons often represent an upscaling of a discourse on the
ecological consequences of the absence of property
rights to local resources popularised by Hardin’s essay
(1968) on the ‘tragedy’ of the commons. It will be
recalled that his essential point was that open access to
a resource sets up incentives for ‘over-grazing’ under
which short term individual gains lead to longer term
ecological collapse. Whereas a local level solution might
be obtained through enclosure and the allocation of
property rights by government, such a course was not
readily available at the global level, where the defining
characteristic of an international system composed of
sovereign states was an absence of world government.
This represents a particular framing of the problem and
we may speak of global commons as social constructs
that overlay, interpret and allocate ‘brute’ physical facts
such as the gravitational forces in space, marine organ-
isms, or deep seabed features that exist independently
of our observation (Searle, 1995).
The designation of areas and resources as global com-
mons is evidently related both to technological change
and scarcity, and the first part of this article considers
how both have combined to shape current definitions of
the commons problem. A trawl through contemporary
usage indicates that the list of candidates for global
commons status continues to grow. Cyberspace or the
‘digital ecosystem’, intellectual property and crop genetic
resources are all so described with attendant implica-
tions for governance and security.
For many observers, the defining characteristic of com-
mons relates to the question of access. There has been
substantial recent interest in the global commons
amongst the military and strategic studies communities
(Jasper, 2010). Their paramount concern is, as ever, the
maintenance of access to strategically significant parts of
the global commons. Access is also at the heart of envi-
ronmental framing of the commons, but here it is the
consequences of an open access regime and associated
tragedies of resource degradation, depletion or destruc-
tion that are usually highlighted. One example would be
fishing in the Southern Ocean where environmental
groups such as the Antarctic and Southern Ocean
Coalition routinely warn of illegal unregulated or unre-
ported fishing endangering migratory fish stocks.
Global Policy Volume 3 . Issue 1 . February 2012
Global Policy (2012) 3:1 doi: 10.1111/j.1758-5899.2011.00156.x ª2012 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Special Section: Research Article
61
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