Jelfs, Peter

The term ‘commons’ has become widely used in recent years to convey shared or cooperative ownership or governance of natural resources, including more open access and global natural resources such as outer space. Governance of commons has a financial dimension to it, including the financing of governance institutions and processes, while also possibly entailing a system of taxation, e.g. applied to the income derived from the exploitation of natural resources. This paper first places taxation in the context of space as commons, i.e. in the context of the range and types of regulation of activities in space that currently exist, especially at international level. It assesses the issue of regulation of space in light of Ostrom’s institutional grammar and subsequent literature on regulating commons. In light of this discussion, it then surveys and evaluates several existing proposals for global taxes relating to space or proposals that are closely analogous to taxation of space activities, in particular: Brock & McMaster on global aviation taxes (2018), Savir’s proposal regarding space-related royalties (2021), and Caljuri on the OECD Model Convention relating to double taxation (2023). The paper concludes by considering the implications for taxation of understanding space within the framework of governance of a commons.