Luederitz, Christopher

The term commoning has acquired a variety of meanings. However, despite the intuitions that many scholars have that commoning has a normative orientation aligned with community building, justice and sustainability, there are no clear conceptual frameworks detailing the values and ethics of commoning practices. Empirically examining commoning practices needs clear frameworks to be able to descriptively and normatively identify and document commoning practices, while also being able to differentiate commoning from other less or non-desirable collective action and community building activities (e.g., organized crime; anti-democratic or discriminatory political movements; collusion). Current research has focused on community-level collective action processes that embody, enable, create or sustain resources held in common, that is the commons. Others emphasize the practices and performances of becoming in common as commoners, entire communities, and their environment. Despite these differences, similar values often underpin commoning - which may include the aim to transform outcomes (e.g., solidarity, fairness, care for the environment) - have yet to be synthesized into a working framework. In this Chapter, we ask: what does an ethics of commoning look like that allows for the realization (and further shaping) of those values? And how can we account for what it means to do commoning (ethically) well? But also, how can we provide orientation to commoning? To address these questions, we introduce a framework that allows for articulating the three interwoven components of an ethics of commoning: (a) values of commoning, directed towards social justice and environmental sustainability; (b) alternative value practices, that engage with the materiality of the world outside of dominant ones; and (c) individual and collective capacities for commoning, based on practical wisdom and virtue ethics. We use the framework to articulate and analyze the ethical dimensions of commoning. Through the idea of commoning wisdom, we use the framework to provide orientation and inspiration about how to think about the ethical work embedded in the practice of commoning.